IntroductionData reveal that most blogs are self-referential, and while an expressivist ambit has merit, this webtext argues in favor of utilizing the blog platform to assist students in projecting a disciplinary and professional identity online. The Arena of
Educational BloggingMany in academe have come to the realization that "educational blogging" offers a range of student-centered and active-learning opportunities, which can result in the cultivation of essential competencies and literacies among students. A Course Built on Blogging Educational Blogging as a Professionalizing ExperienceThis section provides evidence from students' blogs, as well as the observations of scholars, to demonstrate the impressive results that can arise when undergraduates post on current and consequential phenomena in their fields. Community, Costs, and Benefits in the BlogosphereThough there are challenges and risks to being heard in the blogosphere, the goal of nurturing students' scholarly and professional personae online yields the possibility of real visibility and valuable contacts. ConclusionWhen blogs are thoughtfully employed, these digitized collections serve as a valuable pedagogical tool, and may contribute to the establishment of a deeper and perhaps durable scholarly and professional identity in the students who produce them. References and Links

Educational Blogging:
A Forum for Developing Disciplinary and Professional Identity
Geoffrey C. Middlebrook
University of Southern California

A Course Built on Blogging

In order to contextualize the models of educational blogging that I will show in the next section, it is necessary to schematize the advanced writing courses at the University of Southern California (USC) from which they emerge. Let me first express agreement with Ruth Reynard (2005) that a blog "must be integrated early into the course design, and must be clearly connected to the course outcomes, before it can become anything more than just an extra task for students" (p. 2). This then raises the matter of what form the blog should take, and to situate my answer I invoke a modified version of the taxonomy that was formulated by Kate Moss (2006). In this classification system the faculty posts on a single blog and the students comment; the students and the faculty both post to a single blog and they all comment; groups of students have their own blogs, at which the faculty comments; or every student has a blog, linked together via a central site, and everyone posts as well as visits the blogs and reads and comments on them.

I adhere to the last of these paradigms (for easy and communal access, links to all of the blogs are gathered on a single page in the course Blackboard site), as it readily allows me to pursue the USC-mandated course objectives that students write clear, grammatical, well-structured prose; discover and convey complex ideas critically; appreciate the nuances of good argument; identify and speak to specific audiences in a voice of authority and persuasiveness; and address the academic, public, and professional aspects of writing within disciplines and career fields. These individual blogs are thematically governed by each student's academic major and/or future profession, and in them students post hypertextual and multimodal entries on phenomena (events, issues, individuals, et cetera) in their fields and of their choosing that are current (just happened, are happening, will soon happen), interesting, important, and not obvious or already known. Before they begin to post students are introduced to an array of award-winning blogs so as to see what is possible in the medium via Schmidt's (2007) "selection, publication, and networking" rules (p. 1412), and to a variety of web search tools and techniques that offer the means to become a skilled and selective online researcher.