A Self-Destructive (or Self-Defeating) Observation

As a teacher I am troubled by the desire to teach students to blog and create websites.  We seem to feel that they should be information producers as rapidly as they become information consumers.  But the whole point of apprenticeship is to separate the neophyte from the journeyman from the master.

So why do we suggest that our students should produce when they are not yet ready to offer something?  In a world that is so information rich that it verges on being the Libray of Babel itself we surely do not wish (as educators) to contribute to informational noise and detritus.  We have an obligation to create discerning consumers and creators, not narcissists who wish to publish their journals or pseudo-/apprentice intellectuals who have been given a publishing press and no gatekeeping process to constrain what it produces.