research and scholarship | Frances Bell

Are we there yet? the notyetness of emerging technologies practice and research in online learning

Any parent will recognise the plaintive question “Are we there yet?” asked by children impatient for the journey to be over, the holiday to start. In using technology in learning and education, hopefully we will never really get there but experience fun in our experiments and learn from our experiences. We may find that there…

Binaries, Polarisation and Privacy

In my writing, reading and thinking during the last year or so, some of the recurring themes are ethics, learning, diversity, popularity and polarisation in Internet culture. Encouraged by my experience at the smallest federated wiki, I am trying different ways of writing, experimenting with partially-formed ideas, linking with and building on what others have…

Women making social media work for good causes

On International Women’s Day I would like to highlight the work of three women doing good with the help of social media and those who participate. Kate Granger is a witty and engaging woman doctor who has used her experience of being a patient with terminal cancer to launch a campaign that has made life…

Open Access and Social Media: Networking around a scholarly article

(The short version is in the last paragraph if you want to skip to there). Heterotopic communication In writing about heterotopic communication (see Foucault’s Heterotopia ), the prescient Leah Lievrouw showed that public and private can relate to strategies for engagement behaviours rather than being properties of spaces (Lievrouw 1998 ). As we communicate apparently…

Cycling between private and public in researching Rhizo14

Our first paper Rhizo14: A Rhizomatic Learning cMOOC in Sunlight and in Shade from the research we conducted at Rhizo14 was published last week at Open Praxis. We would love you to read it and respond. One of the themes that has engaged us in the research process is the delicate dance between the private…

ALT Annual Conference 2015: Shaping the future of learning together – submission deadline approaching

The ALT-C 2015 Conference is at the University of Manchester 8-10 September, and will be hugely enjoyable if my experience of previous conferences is anything to go by. Two excellent keynote speakers have been announced: Laura Czerniewycz who does great work in Open Education and Steve Wheeler , a prolific and popular blogger and tweeter….

The Flexible concept of the Terrible Sea lion

I saw this cartoon again a week ago and it reminded me of my first reaction to it so I went off to see what some others thought. David Hopkins gave the following response to the Terrible Sea lion cartoon “I don’t tweet, but I’ve found the Sea Lion strip quite thought-provoking. The most interesting…

Revealing and celebrating learning beyond education

Note: this blog post is written to accompany a Twitter chat 8-9p.m. GMT, Wednesday 11 February 2015, follow #LTHEchat Figure 1 What am I thinking? Dave Young https://www.flickr.com/photos/dcysurfer/4928601429 CC BY 2.0 Learning often wears an invisibility cloak. It’s not even that we think it’s magic, but rather that it happens in the course of other…

Nobody asked you, sir she said

My first ever memory of a ‘feminist’ reaction was to this nursery rhyme “WHERE are you going, my pretty maid?” “I am going a-milking, sir,” she said. “May I go with you, my pretty maid?” “You ’re kindly welcome, sir,” she said. “What is your father, my pretty maid?” 5 “My…