Interesting stuff. I've just gotten a bit "blog happy" myself (see the ones listed at my web site).

Here's a thought-- just as the web in general before blogs, and email and bbs svcs before that, the creation of a space for possible communication doesn't mean people will feel moved to use such spaces for actual communication. In other words, you gotta wanna post for some reason. Higher traffic seems to happen on blogs that represent a social community that already exists (I hang on typophile, which is for, well, typophiles). It's easy to create new blogs. It's harder to create -- and then get people to use -- new social communities. I mean, what if you posted a sign by your lunch tray in a crowded cafeteria that said, "Blog Discussion Space." What would happen? Actually, I have no idea, but it might make an interesting experiment.

As for first-year students-- a lot of them are in an authoritarian mindset. I.e., they'll happily comply if you require them to post to a blog (which I never would do). But if you leave it open-ended (as I have in two of my classes), you're then asking them to help you form a new social community. Except for a couple here and there, I don't imagine many feeling compelled. They go on with their lives without one's blog and, well, that's ok.

You make the excellent point that creating a blog and creating a community are completely different animals, so to speak. Build it and they will come? Likely not, unless there is the reason you're referring to. Even in beginning to theorize about the potential blogs might hold for us pedagogically, I'm left with the essential question of what can foster a desire in students to actually engage with them. I think that blogging has to be somewhat compulsory for a time. Perhaps if the blog assignments are given in a non-authoritative way, what Ann Berthoff refers to as 'assisted invitations,' then dialogue will begin to organically sprout from those initially forced contexts. I suspect that, like any new thing, it will take people time to develop a comfort level with the medium.  After all, it's not everyday when we are asked to engage in a public forum about our intellectual ideas.  Indeed, most of our students have never had this experience before blogging.  So, it will be interesting to see how blogs are integrated into classrooms over the next decade or so. 

Both of you are definitely right about avoiding the "If we build, they will come attitude." I've seen that attitude fail too many times, not just in terms of the classroom, but also creating any Internet community.

One thing I would encourage is to also avoid the blog hope that academic/educational bloggers have that their students will blog as they have. How we might use it pedagogically is perhaps necessarily different from how we use it as teachers/researchers outside of the classroom, in much the same way that email is used for a variety of purposes.

This is why I tend to go with the blog as journal approach, and think of the benefits of having an online journal which can be

• Public (within the classroom or on the Internet)
• Easily shared/distributed. Note how this is different than the print journal where the author must give up the journal temporarily to share it with others. The blog is always accessible to reader and author.
• Easily published to. Requires minimal instruction for students to publish to the web.
• Interactive. Comment boards and trackbacks allow others to interact with the author's text while still making the main blog post--the author's main writing--privileged over the rest of the discourse.
• Collaboratively authored. Blogs can be community authored (like this one).

So the blog as journal is more dialogic than the traditional print journal. It might not be as active as we see other blogs on the Internet, but we can use it effectively to encourage engagement.

I guess Bakhtin would argue (as well as Peirce) that even an unread journal blog is dialogic to a degree. That is, it's always in relation to alterity. In "Dialogic gradation in the logic of interpretation" from Semiotica 153-1/4, Augusto Ponzio writes:

    We could have a purely formal dialogic situation with two or more interlocutors between whom,             however, there is no effective relation of alterity, or we could achieve a substantially dialogic                 interaction among the selves of one and the same person. (p. 166)

What I get from this is that even in ideal interactive dialogue, dialogism isn't guaranteed if it doesn't involve alterity.  Of course, I'm applying this highly theoretical concept to the blogosphere but I think the application has some merit.  Else, why would single author blogs with no outside comments exhibit such high degrees of dialogism?  I'm thinking here of some Iraqi blogs which have since become books, like Baghdad Burning.  Of course, Bakhtin was theorizing the novel when he conceived of dialogism but I think its relevance for those of us trying to teach with blogs lies in this idea of alterity.  

If you think about it blogs also most often feature reported speech of some kind.  The author generally hyperlinks something from someone else (a thought, news story, issue, etc.) that he/she then discusses--whether there is anyone talking back or not.  The journal-istic quality of that exchange is dialogic, the question remains whether it is more dialogic because it is public (which I suspect is your first bullet point for a reason).