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.