Topic 5 : Reflection

The debate over materials being freely available online has been perhaps the most broad and most intriguing topic so far due to the fact that it has integrated all the topics that are influencing our student lives as well as our personal ones.

Although I personally decided to focus more on the student research side of the topic and discussed the advantages and disadvantages of scholarly articles made online, the topic covers a large base of content and for example reading Hafizuddin’s post about the topic provided a lens into a different subsection that his topic covered. By reading his post on gaming I discovered that two relatively unrelated sub-sections of this topic have the same basic principles when discussing the advantages and disadvantages.

For example, one point I made in my blog post about making scholarly articles available online is that they would be exposed to a larger and would thus be more famous and had the potential to be cited on a larger level. Hafizuddin discussed the point of how game creators who create free to play games will also be given a high level of exposure to their content. This is due to the people trying the game for free and then showing it to other people who can also enjoy the game for free, this may allow creators to build a reputation for good games they create so they can benefit in the long run by having as many people as possible trial their game content.

I think what I have learnt from this topic and interacting with the other blogs is that although the debate over whether producers should allow the content to be freely available online covers a large umbrella of sub-sections, the advantages and disadvantages of each have the same core fundamentals whatever industry the content is in.