Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

Further to my posting on April 1st, the blooker prize had been awarded to Julie Powell for her book, Julie & Julia. More information can be found on the Blooker prize website. The media have certainly latched on to the concept of the prize. Here’s the report on the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News last night.

US cook wins blogging book prize 10/04/06
In fact the broadcast piece in more about blogs than blooking. Is there really a problem that bloggers don’t have editors, and as a result they are potentially inaccurate? Isn’t this the same argument used against wikis? Blogs and wikis are monitored and checked by their readership. It seems to be that those that hold ‘power’ over information might just feel threatened by the ‘democratisation of writing’. In the classroom we use creative writing to release potential, and yet in the adult world, such potential crushed and categorised as failure. How many award winning writers have we lost in the past by the culture this has created? If learners gain a taste for being authors, and gain a real audience for their work, then we can only add to the sum of human knowledge and experience. This is why a ‘revolution’ is occuring. In the same way that the printed book released ‘authorship’ from an small elite, the internet is also empoweriing a wider section of the population to publish.