Things that make you go “WTF?”

There was a lit­tle buzz among blog­gers, kicked off this week by Pod­nosh (and picked up by Bad Sci­ence) around a report pub­lished by the Char­ity Com­mis­sion stat­ing that (to para­phrase) “wikis and blogs have no edu­ca­tional value”.  I’m not going to go into a detailed stance here (I’ll let the dis­cus­sion on Pod­nosh and Bad Sci­ence do that for me, they’re doing a won­der­ful job), but I am going to make one obser­va­tion:  What does this mean for the BBC? Let me explain.

If you take a look at who makes up the Char­ity Com­mis­sion, you’ll find Sharmila Nebhra­jani is one of the com­mis­sion­ers.  Sharmila is also COO of BBC Future Media & Tech­nol­ogy, and this is where I get con­fused.  The com­mis­sion has a mem­ber who runs the BBC depart­ment that han­dles its dig­i­tal con­tent, web­site, and (I would assume) blogs and pod­casts.  The com­mis­sion doesn’t see blogs as edu­ca­tional, yet the BBC con­tin­ues to sup­port Sharmila’s depart­ment in spite of a £36 mil­lion overspend.

Did I for­get to men­tion that Sharmila also has a Face­book account?

Does this strike any­one as mildly … well … odd?