In the introduction to her 1987 book, Context and Response, Lou Kelly, the long-time director of the University of Iowa's Writing Lab, described the ways she hoped her students would participate more deeply in their own literacy skills and practices as a result of the writing course they were taking. Her statement of founding values translates well to the realm of the weblog:
The opportunities for self-involving writing which this book offers will take you from talking on paper to thinking on paper: from using your own expressive, everyday language to composing the more complex linguistic and rhetorical forms needed to express more complex ideas. While writing your way through one or several parts of this book, you will also find opportunities for self-involving reading which is directly related to the personal knowledge and ideas you are exploring in your writing. But the development of your writing and reading abilities is possible only when the messages you're sending out, and the messages you're taking in, are being shaped, and challenged, by your own perceptive questioning mind.
Lou's course began exactly where the students were as readers and writers when they walked into the Lab that first day, but self-involving writing and reading grew as the writers enlarged their sense of audience in response to the engagement generously given by Lou and then by other students. Writing Lab teachers read carefully and generously. They often responded by asking a few serious and challenging questions that indicated what they had understood and what more they wanted to understand about the writer's ideas and experiences.
On a good day in a good semester, a teacher has a chance to see a healthy sense of audience build among students. They sit in pairs or small groups and give each other lively, detailed feedback, and they even manage to strike to the heart of a draft's problems and make very challenging suggestions for rethinking and revising. They have become a serious community of engaged readers and writers. Their conversations are energized and energizing.
When you look around the web at some class blogs, you notice that the some writers don't have that energy. I attribute this, in part, to a difficulty they may be having developing that sense of audience. Students are not likely to build a strong outside readership in the first month or two of a semester, and unless classmates are guided to participate as readers and respondents, a student blog can have an attenuated sense of audience. Strong students can produce self-involving writing without an audience, but others will struggle.
If teachers don't help students assemble an audience, then weblogs will become mere assignment-posting spaces, and their special value will be lost. Supported and challenged by the best sort of audience, however, students have often written well. Since weblogs add new dimensions to the classroom, the potential audience, and the raw materials of writing, we can expect great things if we can name our goals clearly and structure our assignments and classroom practices soundly.