In "Digital spins: The pedagogy and politics of student-centered e-zines," Jason Alexander's introduction talks about how "staged" audience is in first year composition. Alexander points out that even just sharing papers among students on the Internet is not enough, and goes on to problematize posting to the web, suggesting that students realize that their only real audience is fellow students and the teacher. However, we would say that by using weblogs in our classrooms, we've turned ownership over to students and given them a real audience. In life outside of the classroom, much like on the Internet, writers will not always know who their audiences are when they write. A report, memo, letter, or fax might cross the desks of numerous people that the writer has never met during the course of a workday. Risk is part of writing, and our students experience that risk within a very supportive community of writers. When we first began teaching with blogs, Charlie recalls being apprehensive himself about putting course syllabi, feedback on drafts, and other teacherly responses up on the web for everyone to see, even though he had been posting to an academic blog for almost six months. But we both feel now, that the shared meaning we and our students have gained from blogging our courses makes it all worthwhile. Imagine. Classes within and among institutions could interact through the use of weblogs as more institutions integrate student blogging into the curriculum, such as the University of South Florida's First-Year-Writing Program's Writing Blogs site.

We hope that researchers and practitioners will take our exploratory, experienced-based musings and extend the dialogue on weblogs in the classroom, opening themselves to the many possibilities of publishing to the Web now that blogging makes practically anyone a web author. Maybe others will come to feel, as we do, that there is something exciting about the way that weblogs facilitate sharing and build community by putting more of our lives online.