research | Frances Bell

Epiphanies – thanks to Shoshana Zuboff

Today is the twelfth day of Christmas, which makes me think of twelve drummers drumming and the Christian Feast of the Epiphany that traditionally celebrates the arrival of the Wise Men from afar. And by the by, it’s also #NollaigNamBan #WomensChristmas in Ireland. noun, plural e·piph·a·nies. ( initial capital letter ) a Christian festival,…

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…

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…

Protected: Two views of ‘community is the curriculum’

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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…

Welcome to Frances Bell – home at last for all the mes

How I got here I started blogging in 2006 with Elgg and moved to my own hosted site at francesbell.com when elgg.net disappeared, but with enough warning for me to back up. All was well for 5 years, except that I wasn’t good at backing up and my ISP was a crook. One day, my…

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…

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…

Four women on a train – one of many possible stories

This story is dedicated to Heli Nurmi whom I have known since we worked together on the CCK08 MOOC in 2008. Heli blogs about open learning, and regularly participates in MOOCs. She has extensive experience of research and practice in education, brings much insight to discussions at blogs and on forums. I have visited Finland…

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…