Activity 22: An open education technology

Write a short blog post suggesting one additional technology that is important for open education, either from the role of a learner or a provider.

"The Cloud"....

As we can interpret this fairly loosely, I'd argue that cloud-based services are having and will have a huge impact. No longer being tethered to a particular location while retaining access to documents, links and networks seems to me to be hugely important in the spread of open educational practices. With tablet sales overtaking desktop PC sales, we need technologies which can sync across devices, hence the popularity of cloud-based file sharing and storage such as Dropbox, Google Drive, social bookmarking tools like Diigo and Delicious, organisers like Evernote - the list is endless - all of which encourage and facilitate the sharing of content and collaborative practices and help learners and teachers to move away from the 'walled garden' and proprietary approach common in many institutions. I'd argue that the increasing interest in BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) initiatives is further proof of this shift. In my view, many HE institutions (at least in the UK) haven't even begun to address this technological evolution and how it affects them, and there are going to be some interesting 'discussions' to be had over the next few years...