UOSM2008 Reflective Summary -Topic 5

For this week’s topic, open access, it was really interesting too see how personal experience created some very different perspectives around an issue which relates to all internet users.

As a student with lecturers who frequently discuss their own published research, my initial reaction to the topic was to focus in this area. Unsurprisingly, several others also seemed to lean towards this idea as we all share a student’s perspective on the issue -for example Emma and Georgia’s blogs.

However, Alysia focussed on a completely different area in her blog which was really interesting, one which relates to her personal internet usage. She discussed open access in terms of newspapers, concluding that she feels they should remain freely accessible; I agreed with this conclusion in my comment and additionally put forward the idea that news media of a story is very similar so paying for multiple sources may be less tempting to customers and may decrease readership. The statistics were interesting and got me thinking of other possible trends in opinion which could also be researched.

Laura’s post hinted towards her marketing background, with reference to online material generating traffic in the international business world and the idea that alternative revenue streams to cover costs can be produced from this. She proposes the business principles to cover costs could perhaps be used in an educational sense to help keep resources open access -a really good idea developed from her marketing knowledge and perspective.
A frequent feature of Laura’s posts seem to be interesting info graphics which generally get several mentions/ compliments so I also posted a link to a website which is a good source of info graphics.

Laura also commented on my blog where I discuss open access of resources pointing out access to the internet itself should also be considered; this idea originated from a video Christian shared with her, social media in action with a good idea being shared! I had written about ethical issues of internet accessibility in a previous blog post but had not linked the two ideas myself.

This week I more strongly noticed how peoples personal perspectives influenced their approach to the work as it is an issue which effects all internet users. Some interesting ideas and links between ideas I hadn’t considered were put forward as well as good visual resources I could easily appreciate such as Alysia’s statistics and Laura /Chrisitan’s info graphics.