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Protected: Two views of ‘community is the curriculum’

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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…

Processing our grief and looking to the future

Yesterday when I heard the EU Referendum result, my feelings moved from dread to grief, and I am hopeful that writing this post will be therapeutic for me. I’d be delighted if anyone wants to respond. Part of my philosophy is that we can learn from mistakes so surely there is something to be learned…

Facebook and #GE2015

Like anyone else from UK on Facebook this morning, I saw the 2015 General Election I voted button that asks you to confirm if you have voted. I was interested to see the data it presents – a time series graph of number of voters who claim they have voted, and an age/gender distribution of…

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…

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…

Getting another perspective

This post is a progress report on the research that we (Frances Bell and Jenny Mackness) have been conducting following our participation in the open course Rhizomatic Learning: The community is the curriculum in January 2014. This research to date has included an online survey, email interviews and a conversation with the convenor of the…

You can’t have one without the other

Over the last few weeks on Rhizo14, I have been troubled with the either/or nature of some of our weekly tasks. We could argue about whether or not that was intended but at least some of the students have perceived concepts as being presented in opposition to each other: Cheating as Learning , Enforcing Independence, Is Books…

Wandering across smooth and jagged spaces – bring a blanket and beware the Chief ants

Short cut Apologies in advance – this is a long post. You could just skip it altogether, or look at the pictures and watch the video. Thanks for getting this far. Textiles for Nomads – feeling it for felt This week I have been engaging with De Leuze and Guattari’s ideas of the Nomad and…