ethics | Frances Bell

A letter I sent to my Macclesfield MP today

Dear Mr Rutley, You are my MP (I live at XXXXXXXX) and whilst I did not vote for you, I have no reason to doubt your integrity. Also, I understand that you served as a government whip until recently. You are in a good position to understand the responsibilities shouldered by those who seek to…

Questionably open and not always by choice

In preparing my ALT format piece for OER19, I thought about these questions in the context of my work as a volunteer IT Buddy at my local library in the town of Macclesfield in the North West of England. Why open? Open for whom? Whose interests are served? In what ways has the open agenda…

What are the literacies of resisting the new norm(al)? #altc

I gave (with the considerable help of the other participants in the room) a 20 minute presentation at ALTC 2017, in the Empowerment in Learning Technology Theme, here is the abstract and here is an autoplay version of the slides There are some speaker notes here that indicate what was said along with the slides. The…

Language, Politics and #OER17

This blog post started life as a comment on Martin Weller’s post about language and how it affects behaviour and thoughts in Edtech. The comment mysteriously disappeared as I posted it so I thought that I would repost it here and link from Martin’s post. The title of the post “Let’s think inside the box“…

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…

Homophily, Intersectionality and Institutional Cultures as played out on Social Media

This has been a bad week for trust and humanity on the Interwebz. First Kathy Sierra left Twitter for reasons she gives in this article (having already been driven off social media and public engagements in 2007), then Julie Pagano who describes how she became a tech feminist killjoy from working in the tech industry….

Ethics and soft boundaries between Facebook groups and other web services

As part of a MOOC on rhizomatic learning that performs itself in many different spaces (Facebook, P2PU, G+, Twitter and others), I am a member of an ‘open’ Facebook group. It is endlessly fascinating, and has given me a lot of scope for reflection about back channels and the exchange of information between open and…