community | Frances Bell

Reflecting before #ALTC : Rear view mirror and forward vision

Objects in Mirror are closer than they appear by Aniket Thakur CC BY 2.0 In preparation for our interactive presentation at ALTC 2018 A personal, feminist and critical retrospective of Learning (and) Technology, 1994-2018, Catherine Cronin and I are sharing blog posts of our personal and feminist histories in education and technology that are sometimes…

Connectivism and Twitter snowball threads

This will be a quick post but I wanted to capture a few ideas sparked by a Twitter thread that probably started here. Hello #HEdigID @SuzanKoseoglu I'm Sue Watling, am interested in the design of educational opportunities, with or without technology but its 2018, the technology is going to be in there somewhere, and may…

Femedtech – you are invited to a work in progress

In early 20187, building on connections, in some cases friendship, and ideas, a group of women practicing and researching in educational technology launched femedtech – a feminist network for people working in education. It appeared via a Twitter account @femedtech, a hashtag #femedtech and a (now defunct website femedte.ch powered by WordPress) and was very…

Intentionality, Cliques and Agency

I read two posts about in/exclusion recently : one from sava singh about cliquenomics; and one from Maha Bali on Intentionality, Community, and When Open Isn’t Open. I really like the way that sava captures an observational view of community and how it can include and exclude. She identifies that although people can have malicious…

Participant association and emergent curriculum in a MOOC: can the community be the curriculum?

Prueba 001 by Magdalena Lagaleriade CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Our third and final paper from research in the context of the Rhizo14 MOOC has been published in the open access journal of the Association for Learning Technology: Bell, F., Mackness, J., & Funes (2016) Participant association and emergent curriculum in a MOOC: can the community be…

Arguing the case for qualitative research on learner experiences

Reading Simon Ensor’s article in Hybrid Pedagogy about the paper Jenny Mackness and I wrote about Rhizo14 reminds me that I made a promise to Simon and others, a promise that I haven’t kept. I said back in March that I would respond to some of the criticisms that Simon and others made of…

Bobbing along – water as a medium of participation in learning

I spent yesterday finding and reading papers about community learning and MOOCs, and working on our lovely data from #rhizo14. Eventually, I felt that I was going around in circles and decided to search for images to help me make some sense of what I was reading and thinking. I found lots of great ‘water’…

Reflections on community in #rhizo14 – more questions than answers

These are some reflections on community in #rhizo14 inspired by the research that Jenny Mackness and I are doing, and my engagement with Maha Bali’s post and the rich comment stream that followed. I just wanted to capture my thoughts as they are currently but would be really pleased to engage through comments. One of the issues that…

Ravelry: a knitting community as a site of joy and learning

“That lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne “ The Parliament of Fowls by Geoffrey Chaucer Evidence that learning starts in the womb is revealed when babies hear lullabies that they will respond to after birth; and learning continues throughout life, as Chaucer says of love. We can all remember from an early…

Framework for Virtual Communities

after Steinmueller This is a very hastily written blog post to contribute to discussion about real or imagined community at Heli’s blog. The diagram above is my visualisation of Steinmueller’s view of virtual community. If you want to find out more about my thoughts in 2003 please click. I’d just like to pick out a…