What more fitting a way to start a blog process that a challenge of the value in blogging itself; an exploration to justify its purpose and intent and a divulging of the uncertainty with which I pursue the advise to do it. One of the questions I use to steer my teaching in the classroom is ‘what are the students creating here’, or ‘what more could they create’ In order to avoid the pitfall of simply transmitting information and then expecting it to be passively received. I am of course a firm believer in the power of creation over the consumption to the point of openly criticising the dependence many students have on keyboard-less devices. However with the accessibility of the public realm - the international library of information that is the internet - simply creating something is not enough. For it becomes an issue of quality when a creation is produced by a professional on such a global stage. This is not to say that content must be ‘world class’, for such a rhetoric would stifle creativity and indeed stop creation in it’s tracks, but that it must have it’s existence justified. Whilst a student should be encouraged to create and share their creations to the world, any of my students could also share experiences of trawling through irrelevant or misleading information in search of something legitimate. And the need for teaching explicit skills around assessing the credibility of online information in no way justifies the creation of low quality content. So should a stream of consciousness or rant be pushed out with the assumption that it should be heard? Or does the suggestion that someone out there can learn or feel supported by your sharing justify the production of everything and anything?
Perhaps the justification lies in the motive to produce and publish - whether this should be made explicit to the reader or not is perhaps another question - that in the self-determining and individualised world that the internet has created it is up to the producer of content to, to a large extend, determine it’s relevance. So, in an attempt to justify the publication of my thoughts and reflections, I find that I can let myself be argued any way - to either share with the world because I can or to keep it to myself because the internet doesn’t need it.