Reflections on Topic 2

“Openness its key attribute is about ­freedom – ­for individuals to access content, to reuse it in ways they see fit, to develop new methods of working and to take advantage of the opportunities the digital, networked world offers” (Weller, 2014)

• openness for greater inclusion and social diversity in education
• finding and using openly licensed resources
• advantages and disadvantages of open and closed technologies
• implications of different open course and MOOC formats in relation to your learning experience on this course.

Openness is definitely important to me. I use a lot of open resourses for my own education, and i also contribute by creating my own resources and posting them to my open educational website that deals with ultrasound education.

I particularly like creative commons, and think that this is a really useful way of letting people know what they can and can’t dp with material they come across digitally. Depending on the type of license, some resources that are licensed under creative commons allow users to even modify and improve on the content. It also saves me a lot of time and money as I do not need to reinvent the wheel.

I also feel that as an educator, I play more of a role of guiding students towards useful resources available digitally. YouTube educational vidoes are an excellent open resource. However there are limitations as well, as I understand that certain countries prohibit access to YouTube.

I believe that education should be accessible to all walks of society, and to all people who have an interest. Unfortunately, we have to be realistic as well, and perhaps meet somewhere in the middle. I always wonder who funds many of the open resources that I come across, and for what purpose ?

There does not seem to be a lot of open learning in the area of my work in my institution. I think that we could certainly do better. I also think that in medicine, educators still value traditional means of developing educational resources. For instance, a published book is considered more of an achievement compared to an educational website with the same content ! There are a great number of excellent free resources for medicine on the internet. These are known as Free Open Access Medical Education (FOAMed). Many of these have excellent content, but I do wonder if students actually use them or prefer to go to the more well established traditional books.

I love digital technology. I think it plays an extremely importany role in open learning. I use Twitter for a lot of learning and have made connections with other professionals here. Digital technology allows collaboration across continents, with people in geographically distict areas. It also speeds up the pace of things, makes things happen faster and more conveniently.