Well, I can speak as one of those types who prefers discussion boards to blogs anyday. I haven't read Steve's piece, but my own experiences have only proven my point that blogs are terrible at fostering community. Typically what results is a disaster like that at writing blog, where hundreds of students merely login to write their required two cents and ignore the rest of the blogs...Even brilliant blogs get quickly swept under the mat, since most instructors (we're all required to require our students to blog this semester) are asking students to "just post your essay to the blog."

As far as community or multi-author blogs go, I don't think you can get much better than Kairosnews or Slashdot. It really takes a certain gestalt among the bloggers to result in something that other people would actually want to read. Obviously, the secret is some type of moderation, focus, and shared responsibility for content. The type of free-for-all blog that results when an instructor asks all students to blog (uh, what's a blog? oh, I post essays there??) just won't work.

I think that instructors need to consider why they're asking students to blog. If what they REALLY want is for students to produce text which will be read, considered, and responded to by other students, then a blog is an incredibly stupid choice--discussion boards win hands-down. If instructors are really just looking for a way to bring the "journal" concept online, then blogs are fine. True, most of the content will be drivel, but the same can be said for "journals."

Teachers who are just dying to jump on the blogging bandwagon would probably do better to setup small groups of bloggers who will focus on narrow topics and developments. It seems that once more than, oh, say 5 bloggers are actively posting on the blog, everything goes to hell. 3 seems to be a good number.

I agree that having every student keep a blog and expecting community to blossom is problematic. And while I like Steve's essay a lot, I think the crucial problem with his bad experience is the same. For blogging to be used successfully in the classroom to foster community, some methods of using it are going to be better than others. So following is a ramble of suggestions:

*The "I'll have every student in the class post a new blog to the community site x times a week" is probably doomed to failure. I think that the real dialogue occurs in the comment boards attached to a post. Now in a discussion board community, it's a little easier to scan new forum threads than in a blog because you get only a listing of titles. But the prinicple is the same whether it be email, blog, or discussion board. Too many new threads merely creates that: a bunch of new threads, not a dialogue.

*Some of it could that expectations are built off the individual blogging experiences of specific teachers outside of the classroom. I don't remember the exact thread (I think I may have posted about either here or on cyberdash), but I believe there was a meme in the blogosphere including Will and Seb where edubloggers were concerned that the kind of blogging they were doing as edubloggers would not translate into the community building in the classroom in a semester. I would agree. I think that community weblogs are the means to community building (seems obvious, doesn't it?)

*Which leads to the choice of tools. Blogger, WordPress, MT, etc. were designed for the individual weblog more so than community interaction. I've had good luck with both PostNuke and Drupal. These applications, though, were developed with intrasite community development in mind.

*We need to be careful in applying our expectations about how email communites form when looking at weblog communities. Whlie certainly analysis which compare the two can offer insight, templates for how email discussion communities work are not going to superimpose on weblogs. And I'm sure that Matt will agree that if we go this route, we'll never figure out how to foster a wiki community ;)

It ocurred to me, as soon as I maed the previous post, of one feature of Drupal, PostNuke, etc., that differentiates them from individual blogging tools: the paging mechanism for the blogging display at the bottom of every page. I don't know how many times I've cursed the stupid archive calendar block on MT sites because it makes it hard to browse recent posts that have moved off the front page. Having to surf all those date links is too inconvienent for me.

That's exactly right, Charlie. I think one advantage of being an early adopter is that we tend to think of the job first and then seek the right tool, rather than the other way round (which happens to most computer novices). A fairly computer savvy individual would say, "Okay, here's what I want to do with my class, and it appears that blogging software will let me do that, so I'm going to try it." The computer novice says, "Wow, blogs are so cool and everyone is doing it, I'm going to use it, too." What's missing is the rationale for choosing the tool, experience with the tool, and usually a total understanding of the tool's true strengths and weaknesses.

I think most writing teachers who don't blog themselves typically see blogs as a way to easily post documents on the web. They miss out on the key elements that set blogs apart from static HTML sites: Namely, personalization, focus on subjectivity, interaction via comments, community-building via links and cross-blog discussions. It seems that these teachers are either stuck on the idea that blogs are "private journals published online" or just a place to dump texts.

I must admit I also find it hilarious when these teachers start to rant and rave about how they don't want to use blogs because "everybody in the world can see what you write." Uh, yeah, as IF the world is just pining to get at this miserable student drivel. I try to tell these folks that the problem is acquiring an audience, not fending them off. That said, I would never ask students to blog about personal matters or things that wouldn't concern anyone else. The blogosphere is polluted enough.

Of course, the true innovators are those who would not only ponder jobs and select the right tools, but would discover new uses for the tools and then dream up new jobs.

Heh, I just looked at writingblog:

http://writingblog.org/

This blog has a lot of potential, but we still need to work on improving it. As good as it is, there are still a few tweaks that could make this system great.

One of the problems is that these blogs aren't being properly truncated. It's too bad that Drupal doesn't support .net.

What you need is community moderation--such as Kuro5hin and what is possible with Drupal--to determine what is made available on the main writingblogs page. That way it showcases what the community finds valuable, rather than looking like weblogs.com.

I just made a case on TechRhet for how weblog communities, like Kuro5hin and Slashdot, scale better than listservs (can you imagine how useless a listserv would be with that level of pariticpation?). But they do so through moderation. The writingblogs home page is not a weblog community--just a collection of weblog posts--although there may indeed by smaller communities within the myriad collection of blogs. Individually they have merit, but as a collective group, it is not a community.

You are also making a good case for the right job for the tool.
As early adopters, we have already examined closely what is possible and have begun working with appropriate applications of the tool. I think we'll see this as more teachers begin gaining experience with blogs; many are still just experimenting with what they can do.

I'd definitely like to see more control over what shows up on the mainpage; I like the voting system whether it be active or passive (i.e., people literally "vote" or the system discovers which blogs are the most often visited or linked to). I also like the comment moderation system on Slashdot--I could see a group of teachers working to moderate comments and award insightful, funny, or informative posts and degrading trolls.

Bloggers should also have the option to determine whether or not blogs should be published to the mainpage or not.

Charlie and Matt, I agree with you... I'm still learning what blogs are good for and how to use them effectively, but I know that the Seton Hill blogging community wouldn't be as strong as it is now if I didn't post "sitewide comments" and "sitewide entries" pages, neither of which would be possible without a third-party extension that aggregates all the recent posts/entries in a single MT installation.

I may need to take some steps to ensure that the social chatter which sometimes dominates the SHU blogosphere doesn't bury the class-related blogging, since some students who don't want to socialize may feel annoyed at having to scroll through pages of chit-chat.

I would accomplish this by aggregating all the blogs from students in each class, which would permit students to filter out the student entries that are unrelated to their coursework. This is, of course, an entirely different issue. Of course I have students who don't like blogging and therefore don't do it, but fortunately the students who do enjoy it can easily find each other online, which creates a positive feedback loop that energizes the whole site.

There... that is probably enough original contribution to this thread that I won't look like too much like a blog whore when I post a link to my reaction to Krause's essay.

Dennis G. Jerz

Jerz's Literacy Weblog

Sounds like you need category-specific RSS so that student posts are automatically filtered. This is assuming that they will take the time to apply the proper category. But I think so. Just tell them that tagging their posts appropriately makes it work like an email--it gets sent to the aggregator :)