social media | Frances Bell

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…

Digital Trespass and Critical Literacy #OER17

Peter Riley explains the Kinder Scout Trespass that took place in 1932 as a protest against the permanent closure of all the wild uplands of Derbyshire for about 12 days of grouse shooting in the year. It has been described as “the most successful direct action in British history” Lord Roy Hattersley, 2007. The other…

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…

A balanced complaint

I caught part of a BBC2 documentary, Trump’s America a Newsnight Special, last night and was appalled by what I saw. From my armchair I tweeted, and it seems a few people saw my tweets but they didn’t seem to make much of a difference except that I probably felt a bit better for having…

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…

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…