So basically when you blog, you have to think about what you have read, how that compares to what you already know or what you have experienced, and that comparison helps you to construct new mental models that you articulate in written form (your blog).

It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory.

Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as well as dramatic irony—the reader will know the ending before the writer did.

A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

Forty-seven percent of teen bloggers write outside of school for personal reasons several times a week or more, compared with 33 percent of teens without blogs. Sixty-five percent of teen bloggers believe that writing is essential to later success in life; 53 percent of non-bloggers say the same thing.

Most students (82 percent) believe that additional instruction and focus on writing in school would help improve their writing even further--and more than three-quarters of those surveyed (78 percent) think it would help their writing if their teachers used computer-based writing tools such as games, multimedia, or writing software programs or web sites during class.

<p>Bloggers reported a greater sense of belonging to a group of like-minded people and feeling more confident they could rely on others for help.</p> <p>All respondents, whether or not they blogged, reported feeling less anxious, depressed and stressed after two months of online social networking.</p>

In reality, most students write many more entries than the minimum required. They also read each other's entries, and comment on them, as do I as the instructor. While the blog writing is motivated as a class assignment, student enthusiasm for the activity is contagious: Once a critical mass of active student bloggers is established (and of course, there are some who steadfastly refuse to have anything to do with it, incentives and penalties notwithstanding), off they go!

How might faculty members use blogs to help their students reach particular learning goals? I use blogs to accomplish two goals in my courses: to facilitate serious communication and cooperation between students on course–related topics and tasks, and to generate efficient and meaningful class discussions.

The difference with blogs, and it is an important difference, is that students take possession of the class blog in ways they never did with these other products.