I really liked John Naughton’s Observer piece last Sunday: If you really want to know, ask a blogger. From Stephen Downes’ summary:
“Because bloggers are often experts in a field, and journalists are often not, the information found in a blog may frequently be more accurate than the information found in a corresponding news article.”
In terms of blogs as vehicles for learning I think there are (at least) a couple more points to make on this.
Firstly, each piece of journalistic work assumes a single level of knowledge, complexity, understanding – call it what you will. If this isn’t my starting point as a learner, I probably won’t learn particularly well. But as blogs proliferate, I’ll be able to find blogs that match not only my starting level on a particular subject, but my learning style, my cultural orientation, my reading level etc…
The necessity to start learning at the right point is both common sense and supported by learning theory. So-called cognitive/rationalists (including famous ones like Papert and Piaget) emphasise the need for “learning activities to proceed from issues and problems that are within the reach of students’ initial understanding and reasoning ability, to issues and problems that require greater extensions of their intuitive capabilities” (Handbook of Educational Pyschology)
But this is different from those nasty old behaviorists who saw learning as a structured progression from simple to complex, along a straight and predictable line built of many small steps. The implication here was that all you had to do was find where in the sequence the learner was, and get them moving along it, using the appropriate mix of positive feedback. More recent theorists emphasise that there are many routes, that start from many origins. The journey to understanding is neither structured nor straight. So starting at the point chosen by a journalist may not be a starting point at all.
The other point about journalists is that they’re supposed to be objective – at least most of the time. And what does objectivity lack? Emotion! And what’s a key component of effective learning? You guessed it. I’ve already mentioned David Weinberger’s term intersubjectivity, so I won’t go on about it again.
6:05:59 PM 
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