If Any Moron Can Write a Blog, Then All Blogs are Written by Morons, Right?

The title of my talk is one phrasing of the general strategy employed by many faculty (and increasingly, students) when it comes to approaching material on the open web. Faculty not only discourage, but often outright forbid the use of blogs, wikis, or other online resources that are not peer-reviewed. Doing so does a disservice to our students and doesn’t encourage the kind of critical thinking and analytical strategies necessary for our students (and us) to participate in our hyper-mediated society. Already, peer-reviewed material appears right alongside non-peer-reviewed material on the web. This will only increase in the future as scholarly work comes out from behind paywalls into the public web. And this will be a good thing. But will our students be ready to sort through multiple channels and sources of information and make informed decisions? In this talk, I will take apart the logic of the title. In the process, I will explore how a blog can be just as good a resource as a peer-reviewed article, how using Wikipedia teaches valuable lessons about cooperation and information creation and perceptions, how having students actively contribute to these resources teaches more than writing an academic paper, and what happens when students leave college and no longer have access to peer-reviewed materials. I want to ask the question, “Now what?” in the context of teaching and learning in a world where everything is on the web and everyone has access to it and to think beyond what happens while students are in our classrooms to the time when they work, play, and vote alongside us. How can we structure our teaching to help create the informed citizenry of the future?