Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander (that is, if students have to do this I guess I should). I realize blogging is der riguer these days but I personally can't get excited about them as either a provider or a consumer. As a professor and administrator with strong capabilities with web development and email, I guess I am blogging constantly and have been for years, though perhaps to a narrow and captive audience.
Blogs are, however, an example of how wrongly advanced computer technology was predicted to affect human interaction. From the mid 1960's to the early 1980's, the notion and even fear was that computers would advance to become our peers and companions or even our masters (e.g., check out one of the best films ever made: 2001 A Space Odyssey), reducing or eliminating human-to-human interaction. What computers have done -- which required tremendous development in the basic information technologies -- is mediate and simply make possible methods of human interaction hardly conceivable 50 years ago: social networking, virtual spaces, instant messaging, blogs, electronic auctions, online courses). A modern concern is that these new forms of interaction can be unhealthy substitutes for "normal" water cooler or front porch chats and the like. Always something to worry about, eh?
