In writing in public, students are forced to confront ideas and positions that contradict their own as others comment on, challenge, and respond to their work. They develop technological skills by using platforms and tools they might not have otherwise engaged in. These capacities are as important as their ability to write, as they also encourage students to listen and think; the act of communicating is not merely about speaking.

Additionally, the learning community is active and expansive (as opposed to exclusive). It extends across multiple cohorts of students, through different years and classes, and continues to operate after the particular subject has ceased. By contrast, inside the LMS, the work disappears into the digital ether when the institution ends access to the course. Students are lost to their own work at that moment.

The use of blogs in this way allows for open discussion and interaction with the professions by not assuming students only become part of their profession post-graduation.

: to develop spaces for independent thought and work.

The perceived risk ought to be further mitigated by recognising that, in part, the pedagogical set up to this process involves developing students’ ability to handle negative interactions and unexpected interruptions by doing work on the ethics of blogging, discussing trolling and other negative behaviours, and equipping them to fix things.

the authority of people sharing links may be suspect, and the fact that links are shared by large numbers of unauthoritative actors may swamp signal in noise.

Add in to the mix that one other ranking factor is likely to be the number of times a link is followed from the Google search results listing (which in turn is influenced by how high up the results the link appears), and you can start to see how a well told story, familiar in the telling, keeps on being retold: the old links dominate.

If it is true that many of the pages from 2013 or 2014 are the most appropriate web results for the technical web searches I run, this suggests that the web may have a problem: as a memory device, new memories are not being laid down (new, relevant content, is not being posted).

Google search increasingly responds to many of my tech related web queries with results that are dated 2013 and 2014

Despite their utter incompetence and unhealthy practices, the regulars were the group that was able to gain control over medicine during the 19th century. Largely comprised of men from upper-class or professional backgrounds, they felt entitled by birth to be in charge of any field they pursued.

According to Loudon (1992: 320), the death rate of white women in childbirth attended by (white male) doctors in a hospital in Lexington, Kentucky from 1927 to 1935 was 800 to 900 per 100,000, whereas the rate in a clinic operated by the Kentucky Frontier Nursing Service (presumably staffed by female nurses) was 66 per 100,000. The death rate at the hands of doctors was more than 12 times higher than when birth was overseen by a nurse.

Our growing inflexibility and unwillingness to work with others with whom we share some values – but who fail to pass an ideological purity test – is the primary cause of dysfunction in our politics at the moment.

a societal value

A pedagogy of abundance, acknowledging that content often is freely available and abundant, may eventually prove relevant in this regard.

Digital Curation as a Core Competency in Current Learning and Literacy: A Higher Education Perspective

Attributes of Open Pedagogy: A Model for Using Open Educational Resources

it can realize an open connection with the outside world

Open Pedagogy is an extension of and not a replacement for didactical approaches a teacher can use.

The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.5