I spent much of last week at a retreat dealing with learning communities, "classes that are linked or clustered during an academic term, often around an interdisciplinary theme, and enroll a common cohort of students." Because writing can be applied to almost any discipline, writing courses are often parts of learning communities. One computer science professor, however, objected to the idea of combining his course with a writing course: "The problem with giving all these writing assignments is that then I gotta grade them."

From what I could tell, "grading" writing assignments meant going over them with a red pen, writing "AWK" or "FRAG" in the margins. Several English faculty hastened to explain that not all writing assignments have to be graded. Indeed, one of their goals is to get students to see writing as an activity that makes and shares meaning, not as something done to get a grade.

This was my cue, so I stepped in. Blogs, I explained, are especially valuable for this purpose. They provide an environment in which students can focus on conveying a message to an audience, which can then respond naturally. Moreover, blogs seem to have even more potential in a learning community than in a traditional class. With classmates commenting on each other's blogs, they're likely to develop the same feeling of community that we see every day in other online communities. Indeed, the entire community could take place online--an e-learning community.

I write about this here partly to model the virtues of blogging, and partly to get insight from the rest of you. Have any of you used blogs in a learning community (as defined above) or seen blogs enhance a sense of community in a class that might not otherwise come together in this way?

Tom Wright