It may be useful to think about both the process and the product of a student's work on a weblog. Writing teachers have used these two terms to help think about the ways we have set up courses and assignments -- as a way of understanding, in part, what it is we are trying to teach when we give a particular sort of assignment. To make two very quick examples, if you require and, by asking content-related questions, respond to rough drafts before students hand in a final draft, your greater emphasis on an extended process of writing may help students build more reflection and critical thinking into their writing practices. If you only mark papers for sentence correctness, you might be telling students to think of writing in terms of a very particular and narrow sort of product.
Why, then, are weblogs worth giving as class assignments?
1. Is the process itself valuable enough to justify using the finite resources of a course? If so, what are the virtues we see in the process? How can they be drawn out or amplified?
2. Is the process valuable if it is done a certain way, using certain concepts or techniques? If so, what are those concepts or techniques? What are the virtues we see in them? How can they be drawn out or amplified?
3. Is there a product other than the process that has some value? Is that product the completed weblog entries or the whole website? It that produce something that can be abstracted from the weblog?
For the sake of conversation, let me propose tentative answers to the three questions.
1. Just as a conversation or lecture held in a classroom is not necessarily a pedagogical event (a successful one, anyway), a weblog completed for a course assignment isn't necessarily a pedagogical event either. It might be true that in ten years everyone will be composing weblogs, but the basics of making one are so simple that we cannot give college credit, I would say, just because a student has let us impose a weblog on him or her.
2. A weblog can be a pedagogical tool if it involves inquiry and reflection, the risk of encountering some complexity, the experience of doing so using the tools of some academic field or profession, the responsibility for thinking through something over time. A person who does these things is making new knowledge for herself, for himself, and if a college course has helped that happen more strategically then there is a skilled teacher at work. We need more discussion of the structures of an assignment, as it influences the structures and practices of a weblog, in order to know more about how this can work.
3. One way to accomplish the things I've said in my answer to #2 might be to ask students to use the process of blogging in order to prepare the content they need in order to make a useful product, such as a web site addressing a question in the field. This web site might be dynamic, might be a weblog, but the thinking and gathering that allows an individual or a team of students to be ready to address the question could also be carried out and recorded in a weblog. So one or more student weblogs, sites of a process of inquiry, could lead to one weblog that offers a body of resources addressing the question they've chosen.
For example, the web site called Good News India. This is not a student weblog, but it addresses a problem -- the need for a resource bank of creative solutions to a range of social problems in India. In doing so, it tries to be a resource for others. Robert M.Holland, Jr., proposed some years ago that students stop writing the usual (often problematic) research papers, which can sometimes be little more than loose cut-and-paste jobs, and start creating guides to the literature on a particular question. He worked with librarians to help students create these guides, and later they were contributed to the college library's collection. In both cases, the product is meant to be of service to others, and that probably stimulates the writers to produce something that addresses serious questions, is informed by the best thinking in the field, and so forth. If there is a product that comes out of a weblog assignment, we might be able to help students achieve the goals in question 2 more readily. Perhaps we can give assignments, however, in which the process is structured so well that the process is product enough.
More on Holland in this post. Robert M. Holland, Jr.'s article, "Discovering the Forms of Academic Discourse," appeared in Audits of Meaning: A Festschrift in Honor of Ann E. Berthoff, edited by Louise Z. Smith, pages 71-79. Boynton/Cook (Portsmouth, NH) published the book in 1988.