I feel like I've been remiss in not getting to blogging about the sessions I attended at 4C's. For instance, Dennis Jerz's “Forced Blogging: Students’ Emotional Investment
in Their Academic Weblogs” (25 March). Dennis gave us some great views of student investment in their blog when considered in light of voluntary or forced (assigned) blogging. One of the students at Seton Hill, Anthony, had this to say during a student online discussion about forced blogging:

As a student solely judging my amount of work to be expected in a 3 credit class, then I'd say forget it, no way. However, I'm getting quite a different vibe from blogging all together. Honestly, I rarely visit Dr. Jerz's blog. But, I do feel that his involvment with our blogs shows a degree of commitment to us as students. Not as college students, but as students. The forum that blogging allows us to take part in is the new town square. Percieving blogs as the new town square pushes me to seeing it as something that Socrates and Plato would frequent. And, it is this perception that encourages involvement beyond requirement and external motivation.

Check out the rest of that post to see other students' comments. Dennis also has some additional information about his presentation on his blog. It is also worth noting that Seton Hill (thanks to Dennis) provides any student who wishes their own MT blog space.

But a more minor point in Dennis's presentation caught my attention. The New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University community weblog acts as a portal to the individual blogsites. Students can go there to see the most recent comments and recent blog posts throughout New Media Journalism blogspace by looking in the left hand column. Dennis noted that this encourages students to blog to the community blog in order to get readers to come see what is going on in their individual sites. This portal is the only place to get that kind overview, and I believe, is forming a community locus which would not be present without it.

Terra and I have had a very positive experience with weblogs in the classroom; we believe this is because of the presence of community space and individual weblog space. For instance, see Terra's Writing Short Fiction where the home page is a community weblog where everyone can post and students have individual blog space in the interior of the site. And what I think is important is discovering how to facilitate the community interaction. But Dennis's point suggests that the community front page can also be used by students' opportunity to post to the front page to draw in more of their peers to reading their individual weblogs, to encourage more commenting in each student's local writing space. Now with Drupal, the recent comments and recent blogs blocks you see on the right side of the front page on the Writing Short Fiction class appears on all pages in the site. What I think I'll try to do the next time I setup a Drupal class site is make those items only available on the main community page, making it more of a portal to the interior, encouraging students to use it more as an entrance and exit point when visiting the site. And, perhaps, find a way to encourage the sort of self-promotional blogging that Dennis is seeing at New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University to stimulate a wider web of interaction.