P.D.: Social Networking for Learning Object Repurposing in

Today there is an abundance of up-to-date highly specialised medical educational content created by medical and health related academic institutions and available in digital format on the internet. Such educational content includes learning objects of conventional types, content unique in medical education and a variety of alternative educational content types, either reflecting active learning techniques and tacit knowledge building experiences and/or stemming from newly introduced Web 2.0 technologies. Such content is often shared among different educators and is enriched, adapted and in general repurposed so that it can be re-used in different contexts. This paper discusses educational content and content repurposing in medical education, i.e. changing a learning object initially created and used for a specific educational purpose in a specific educational context in order to fit a different new purpose in the same or different educational context. It presents different repurposing contexts and an overview of the current state on content repurposing. Finally, it proposes a novel approach to content repurposing via social networking of learning objects