Some of us here at Worcester are trying to empower students to make their own decisions about what data is appropriate to use and to help them develop criteria and skills to judge the worth of information for themselves. Others still have an idea of a fixed hierarchy of “information value” usually expressed as “peer reviewed journals books and then the rest”.

I have colleagues who will give assignment instructions which warn against using the Internet as a source of information, this is particularly galling for me as I teach web design and for my students the Internet is a source of excellent information.

I have known tutors who will not allow students to post their own links to information, they insist that the student sends the information to them so that it can be vetted before it is published (or not). Not only does this present a bottleneck it strongly discourages students from posting material and of course it removes any possibility of the students learning from an open debate about the worth of the material. In my experience it is difficult enough to get students to contribute material and ideas without putting additional obstacles in their way.

I have had a similar experience recently with posting a comment on a blog, when I found that it did not appear but went off to the administrator for vetting. My first response was to never comment again but on reflection I contacted the administrator and explained my attitude to the situation to them and they changed the settings to allow open comment.

While I am on the subject of student autonomy I was listening to the Go Digital blog from the BBC World Service about the 100 dollar laptop and some excellent points from a guy from Nottingham University about how the students needed to be empowered to use it for learning and how this needs to be built into the system. They then went back to the studio “expert” who seemed to miss the point entirely and talked about how a VLE could be used for lesson plans. It worries me that such “experts” might be listened to and the whole project may not fulfill its potential as a consequence of this.

I have also added a link to my web site under the My links section in response to some comments I read recently on Stephen Downes’ blog about bloggers who do not say who they are.

There is some excellent discussion here about how things might go if learner’s are given a flexible and personalised learning environment to work with rather than the manager centred systems that we have at the moment. In fact it might be a useful advance if tutors in higher education were allowed the freedom to use their own learning tools rather than being constrained by a central system that fails to do a good job for anybody.

Unfortunately many tutors seem to like the ability of these systems to give some control to the tutor and take it away from the learner. I was at an event last week where a tutor had his students send material to him and he loaded it onto the system. As there is a presentation area available on the system where the students could upload their own material, though it can be difficult to use, I am not sure whether this was censorship or paternalism.

I hope that we can all go with the idea that anything we put out for others to see is work in progress and we welcome supportive evaluation and critique. That is the way I work as I don’t pretend to be an expert in anything but I have some ideas that I would like to investigate and to share with others. Not that anybody reads this blog