Don't worry, faithful 3 or 5 readers! I'm not killing this thing yet. I'm thinking about the phenomenon of teachers incorporating blogging into coursework. It's not something I've done myself, but last quarter I took two classes where it was either required - as in this case - or optional - as in this. But now those blogs sit there, most likely unread and unused, and that makes me a little sad.
"Things change," my father might say, taking a nonchalant bite out of his peanut butter sandwich. Yes. And as a recent review of my own blog list demonstrates, people abandon or delete their blogs all the time. But given that, how useful are blogs as teaching tools? Would it make more sense for teachers to ask students to post to pre-existing, more heavily trafficked sites than to create new forums that seem to only have a shelf life, and a core audience, that lasts as long as the class itself?
