Bud Gibson at Michigan State pointed me to his analysis of Weblog use in his classes last fall and it has some interesting insights into the dynamics of a blog classroom. What I like is that he shares the struggles and the solutions out in the open so we can all learn from his experience. Here’s a snippet:

By design, blogging allows individuals to raise topics of interest and create threads of conversation without having to ask anyone’s permission. That was an explicit design consideration for this course; I wanted to know what was going on with students…

Second, because blogging also produces XML-based feeds, it is very easy to aggregate all of the individual contributions in one place while still maintaining individual attribution.

Third, the XML-based feeds in blogs allow me to join people and resources to my group vs. having to get them to join me. Note, I did ask permission of everyone whose feed I aggregated into our site, but they did not have to go through a sign-on process and explicitly produce content for the site. By localizing content creation, blogs make it possible to ask permission and get a coherent stream of content.

Bud says that an analysis of student surveys about the class is upcoming.