The web teaches us that we can be part of the largest public ever assembled and still maintain our individual faces. But this requires living more of our life in public. On the Web, the notion of a diary has been turned inside out: weblogs are public diaries. It is likely that the neat line we draw between our public and private selves in the real world will continue to erode, grain by grain (Weinberger, 2002, 177).

Given that students have access to the Internet, weblogs can easily replace traditional classroom uses of the private print journal. While weblogs are normally public, free tools such as Blogger can be used for private, expressive writing. Students need only choose "no" when Blogger asks if they want a public blogsite, keep their site's location on the web secret, and exchange the URL only with the teacher, resulting in a private electronic writing space where they can be free to express the personal. However, to use blogs merely as a tool for private journaling is to privilege our understanding of journals as private writing spaces without considering the benefits of weblogs as public writing. Whether as researchers investigating a topic, pundits championing a cause, or expressivist writers exploring their feelings about themselves and others, students can also easily share a journal, not just with a teacher, another class member, or the entire class, but potentially with any interested reader on the Internet.

Consider Sebastian Paquet's personal knowledge publishing, "an activity where a knowledge worker or researcher makes his observations, ideas, insights, interrogations, and reactions to others' writing publicly in the form of a weblog" (2002). For instance, academics bloggers Jill Walker, John Lovas, and Dennis Jerz use their weblogs to share ideas about their specific fields of interest, as well as the personal:

• On Literacy Weblog, possibly the longest running weblog in English, Jerz discusses his research on memes and text games, provides links to resources for his students, and regularly critiques items from around the web on a host of cyberspace cultural issues.

• At Jocalo's Blog, Lovas gives daily descriptions of his teaching and service work with De Anza College, often with introspective looks at professional issues for community college faculty.

• At her popular jill/txt site, Walker blogs about weblogs, hypertext, and narrative theory, while also sharing thoughts about relationships, family, and friends. Recently, she solicited feedback from the weblog community as she drafted her definition of "weblog" for the upcoming Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory.

Each of the examples above can serve as good models for student blogging. Weblogs as personal knowledge publishing parallels Susan McLeod's description of journals as a way to

help students explore and assimilate new ideas, create links between the familiar and the unfamiliar, mull over possibilities, [and] explain things to the self before explaining them to others. The analog for this kind of student writing is the expert's notebook--the scientist's lab book, the engineer's notebook, the artist's and architect's sketchbook (the journals of Thomas Edison and Leonardo da Vinci are prototypical examples). (2001, 152)

In our classes, students use their blogs for a wide range of writing, much like a combination of a commonplace book and a diary put together:

• Reading responses;

• Articles and items of interest that they find on the web that are related to class--texts about writing, for example;

• Research responses (akin to the double-entry journal as defined by Bruce Ballenger in The Curious Researcher);

• Personal explorations on topics ranging from "Ten Things I Really Like About Myself" to favorite family traditions and pet peeves;

• And, of course, our students have an open invitation to submit off-topic blogs/journals. Off-topic posts have included a lament about a flea-infested apartment, a link to an article about the Sims Online, a link to downloadable Esheep--and "They're so cute!" comments--and various day-in-the-life-of-a-college-freshman blogs.

McLeod's definition, though, along with other discourse on journals in composition, restricts journal writing to the completely private or the immediacy of the classroom. Weblogging, as a publishing phenomenon which allows anyone--even those with little technical expertise--to maintain a website and regularly write online, promises to complicate journaling with the introduction of the public. As two teachers who have used weblogs in our classrooms for the past two years, we have found that by extending the discourse to a large community outside of the classroom, our student bloggers regularly confront "real" rhetorical situations in a very social, supportive setting.