Reusing Resources: Open for Learning

This special issue of JIME includes five chapters written for the book Reusing Open Resources: Learning in Open Networks for Work, Life and Education (Littlejohn and Pegler, 2014), a collection of edited chapters which aims to extend the discussion around resource reuse initiated in Reusing Online Resources: A sustainable approach to e-learning (Littlejohn, 2003), which was itself the subject of a series of commentaries in a special edition of JIME (http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/jime/article/view/2003-1-reuse-01). During the decade of research and practice that separates these two books our understanding of what reusable resources are, who might wish to reuse them, how reuse would be achieved and what motivates reuse and why it happens (or does not) has shifted. A growing interest in and use of open educational resources (OER) and open educational practice (OEP) has taken a grip within the world of education, supported by open licences. This represents only one area of openness relating to sharing resources (e.g. in the workplace, programmers may collaborate around open source code, or scientists share open data). Within and beyond formal work and education settings we also now see sharing of resources online as social objects (Engeström, 2005) becoming everyday activity for users of social networking sites such as Facebook (started in 2004) and Twitter (started in 2006). There is a dynamic flow of knowledge through social exchanges involving the creating, sharing and using of online open resources as everyday activity. But what does this mean for learning and learners?