Who decides what's "Research Safe"

Will Richardson wrote yesterday about blogs and credibility. :

Here's the problem. If we are going to help teachers see blogs as "research safe," we're going to have to give them some tools by which to assess those blogs.

This is reasonable question, but one that has behind it a significant presupposition, that is, that some educational authority must declare blogs in general, or a blog in particular, to have official imprimatur. I realize that some of this may be inevitable in a K-12 environment, but when you transfer the idea to post-secondary ed, it's downright disconcerting.

Eventually, students will be sent into the wide world, with only their own brains to tell them what is "research safe". Therefore, as soon as is practical, we need to make students do the assessing rather than teachers. Practice makes perfect, after all.

A thornier issue may be convincing faculty, particularly those who are "digital immigrants" (Paul Chenoweth's term) that a resouce which does not have a paper form and the peer review of which was neither blind nor formal (blogs, after all, have peer review, at least when the comments are on) can have academic value.