Quinton and Smallbone (2010)’s work on student reflection and learning, within the use of digital media and open data, could be explored in the terms of continued education. By allowing educational digital media to be open and accessible to everyone could allow for further education, understanding and learning from prior examples and mistakes. This would aid in helping future teaching as well as those who are hoping to up-skill and understand other areas for their own development. The idea of such open data does have its merits – allowing for support across educational facilities, counties and possibly even countries; however, that is not to say that there are not drawbacks of open data. By opening up so much data in such a way would, inevitably, break laws around personal information, consent of data, along with multiple others. There are many in the world who would not agree that the positivises of such open data would ever outweigh the breaches of such confidentiality. Yet, in argument to this, is it so different from the technology-saturated world which we currently live in? Said information and data is already currently online and assessable to certain people. Would it be such a change to allow more people this assess? I am sure some would think it would be. Yet I am sure there would be as many others who would be grateful for the support given in their time of need. This, as many topics when it comes to digital media, is a difficult conversation, one of which does not have an easy answer when trying to please and answer to many different arguments, laws and voices.

References

Leszczynski, A. et al. (2016) Speculative futures: Cities, data, and governance beyond smart urbanism. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. SAGEjournals. https://doi-org.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/10.1177/0308518X16651445

Quinton, S. and Smallbone, T. (2010) Feeding forward: using feedback to promote student reflections and learning – a teaching model. Innovations in Education and Teaching International. Volume 47, 2010 – Issue 1. https://doi-org.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/10.1080/14703290903525911