Networked practitioner: open or closed practice?
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# 2.3 Balancing a more open or a more closed approach

Figure 2 achieving balance in your approach is critical to success

While we may not want to have a totally closed approach to being a networked practitioner, we need to consider a balanced approach to information sharing. This requires safeguarding what is important to protect, while not prohibiting valuable access to information that we need and want to be open. This impacts on how we act and our practices as a networked practitioner as well as the systems we use (Adams and Blandford, 2005; Adams and Sasse, 2005).

Although some closed practice, with regard to accessing information and its usage, is essential, it should not impede our original objectives. For example, personal exam results could be openly accessible to everyone as soon as they become available. However, there could be psychological repercussions for students as these are, for many people, very personal and judgmental pieces of information. Students often need to come to terms with their own results and deal with the repercussions, both good and bad, before they inform others. Security systems support that restricted access for privacy purposes. Yet we need to carefully consider what requires closed access and what should be open. Often, as a society, we are too risk averse and we tend to restrict access by default without carefully understanding why. This can have adverse effects on learning systems and practices as security mechanisms, and their poor implementation, have been found to present serious usability problems (Adams and Sasse, 2005; Adams and Blandford, 2005).

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