His description of the audience reaction is pretty interesting:

Of the 60 or people in the audience, only a few raised their hands when one presenter asked how many of them were bloggers; I was a little surprised to see that, when the presenter asked how many people use blogs to teach, more hands went up — instructors who don’t actually identify themselves as bloggers are requiring their students to blog. I don’t make this observation as part of an argument that only bloggers should be allowed to teach with blogs, but because it seems that teaching with blogs is not enough to make some people feel that they are “really” bloggers. This is directly analogous to the observation that students who blog only because their instructor tells them to are missing out on the benefits that those of us who are excited about blogs tend to observe.

There is a ton to write about that little snippet as I think it captures the main issues that most of us struggle with. How do we transfer the excitement we feel for this to our students and teachers?

Some other 4C links to “Whose Voices Get Heard? Gender Politics in the Blogosphere,” an interesting piece of research about blogs from Clancy Ratliff, and Joe Moxley who says:

Interesting to see how popular blogs were this year at College Composition and Communication Presentation. Wikis are next. I mean, come back in 3 years. Still, we gotta SharePoint next.

SharePoint? Ugh.
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