Sharing journals within the writing classroom is not a new concept. Well before weblogs became popular, Chris Anson and Richard Beach (1995) encouraged teachers to extend the principles behind the dialogue journal to peer dialogue journals, where, working in pairs or groups of three, students share journals entries. Like weblogs can, peer dialogue journals provide students "with the social interaction and motivation to extend their writing" not available through private journal writing (65). However, as Anson and Beach caution, the logistics of sharing print texts could make it difficult to coordinate and exchange dialogue journals in the classroom. As an alternative, they suggest email peer dialogue journals, "interactive environments" that can create "a strong sense of community in which students can assume an active role as a participant" (76). Though they make sharing more logistically sound, email peer dialogue journals still keep sharing within the walls of the classroom.

Because of the benefits of social interaction, most writing teachers would agree that students sharing their writing--making their writing public--is important. For example, in their introduction to Public Works: Student Writing as Public Text, Emily Isaacs and Phoebe Jackson note Kenneth Bruffee's contribution to our understanding of the importance of public writing: Bruffee emphasizes the value of the social nature of public writing, a condition he identifies as common in nonacademic settings. In his work, Bruffee argues strenuously for students to go public with their writing to receive feedback, on the grounds that public writing in classrooms deemphasizes teacher authority and promotes student-writers' abilities to see themselves as responsible writers and to view writing as a social activity. (2001, xii)

Such principles inform our understanding of peer response and are now integrated into process theory. Writing teachers commonly use small group or full class workshops as the means for students to share their writing. By making their writing public in class, students begin to take responsibility for/ownership of what they have to say rather than handing it directly over to a teacher-reader-grader. Writing teachers have also extended this notion to electronic discourse. Many use email as a way for students to share drafts or configure electronic writing spaces in course management systems. Teachers even create journal spaces in Blackboard or Web CT discussion boards.

These electronic spaces are not quite private; however, they are not quite public, either. For instance, Blackboard and WebCT, with their emphasis on content delivery and teacher administration functions, are classroom-only gated communities. Institution-maintained course management sites may have WWW addresses and contain links to other Internet sites, but as they move through the password-protected virtual hallways, students easily realize such online class spaces are not the information superhighway. Instead, they are only one way streets that pull content without contributing to the larger discourse which is the Web. Within password-protected classroom spaces, these student writers are safely sequestered from the discourse community of the Internet.

Many common writing class practices, like the use of Blackboard and WebCT, reflect a restricted definition of public, a rhetorical situation with which students are all too familiar after years of writing for English classes: that of the classroom, a place in which the grade and the teacher are largely what matter. Recognizing this, teachers often try to expand the audience that students write for by asking them to articulate imagined or simulated rhetorical situations for writing projects, such as "write in the manner of the 'Talk of the Town' essays found at the beginning of each week's New Yorker magazine" (Bishop, 2004, 183). Or, teachers may ask students to choose a publication and write an article who's subject matter, voice, and style are congruent with what might be found in that publication. The problem with such artificial rhetorical situations is that ultimately, the real audience is still the teacher--and students know this. As a consequence, some teachers have students work with real audiences outside of the class. Students write for class newspapers or zines and do service learning activities where the final product is shared with an organization or community

We believe, as Catherine Smith does, that students "take real-world writing more seriously when it is done on the Web, where it might actually be seen and used" (241). Many students today regularly email friends and family, converse via instant message daily, participate in multiplayer online games with people from around the Web, and surf Internet sites much as earlier generations read magazines and newspapers. Students see the Web as a public, playful place different from the writing spaces they typically work in within the classroom. Recognizing this, some composition teachers now assign individual hypertexts or group hypertext projects such as webzines, hoping to tap into the students' sense of play and familiarity with online environments in order to stimulate investment in and engagement with their writing.

Student hypertext projects expand the concept of the public audience to include the entire web. Yet, weblogs as a social, public genre can have equal if not more appeal to a generation who enjoys seeing the private made public on Survivor and MTV's Real World, while also fulfilling the pedagogical goal of expanding audience outside of the classroom. When students hesitate to share their texts publicly--given the association of the word "journal" with the word "private"--an exploration of weblogging will clarify for them that a weblog is a public way of sharing ideas. Each semester, we introduce our students to weblogs by asking them to visit weblogs.com and by engaging them in discussion of articles such as Rebecca Mead's You've Got Blog: How to put your business, your boyfriend, and your life on-line (2000). Through these activities and after a little time gaining experience as bloggers, students come to see weblogs as a fun communication medium in which they can and want to participate as writers and readers.

Weblogs, as an electronic publishing tool, also offer significant practical and pedadogical differences and advantages over student hypertext assignments for both writing teachers and students alike. In light of the following comparisons, writing teachers may appreciate Pat Delaney's (2002) "analogy of the Dreamweaver and ftp-ed webpage as 'paper making' and blogging as 'writing on pre-made digital paper'":

• Web page projects generally require specialized software, such as Netscape Composer or Dreamweaver, and a file transfer method, applications which may only be available in classrooms or school computer labs or need to be purchased or downloaded onto students' personal computers. Since weblogs are a browser-based application, students can work from almost any computer that has Internet access.

• Students then have to learn to use the specialized applications for creating web pages, understand server file management, and learn some HTML basics, requiring the teacher to act as a web design tools educator and technical support. Teaching students to use weblogs is very simple: most weblog programs use web-based forms where students can enter plain text, much as they would when creating an email or using an online discussion board.

• Teachers not only have to serve as technical support for using specialized applications, but also serve as techno-rhetoricians. Johnathan Brenda (2001) points out that students "lack background in the principles behind designing a Web site that really communicates something to an audience" (63). With the emphasis on creating text and not graphical layouts when using weblogs, teachers can focus on writing for the web without getting into graphical design and visual rhetoric.

• Web pages that students create are usually static HTML--to be read, but without any opportunity for reader feedback on the site. Blog software is much more interactive; most include comment boards, allowing readers to easily attach feedback to any post.

Using Delaney's "digital paper," we've found that blogging and reading blogs prepares students to write online. Weblogs can serve as an alternative to hypertext assignments, or even make hypertext assignments more effective. In our experience, students sometimes get carried away with the eye-candy of web site design--images, fancy layouts, Marcomedia Flash--at the expense of working on the alphanumeric part of their texts. Working with weblogs privileges writing: students are more invested in the writing that goes into end-of-the-semester hypertext projects when they've been writing for the web all semester. They learn rhetorical strategies for writing online before moving on to work with graphics. They also learn about how to make effective hyperlinks--a crucial part of website design and blogging. Thus, students spend more time developing their texts, rather than working mostly on graphics and choosing the "perfect" background. These texts likely end up being more rhetorically sensitive than without the intervention of the blog.