Analysis: One counter point is that access to technology could create an obstacle for students. Students are opening themselves up for negative criticism, and this could hurt their writing experience. Another one is that there is no real format and as students go onto college other courses may require essays done in a certain format. It is not a controlled environment for feedback, and if negative feedback appears you can go in and delete it but that won’t make what you already read go away.

Summary: In the article “Why Blog?”, by Alex Reid, talks about how it takes 10,000 hours for a person to practice that skill to become an expert. The average college student writes less than 500 pages of writing which is about 1000 hours of writing. This means that it would take about 36 or more years to get to that 10,000 of writing to become an expert. He is an advocate of blogging. Writing can increase intrinsic motivation. Writing takes practice and blogging comes in all different shapes and forms, so it is open to a very wide audience, and he recommends blogging can take up to a month to really decide. He recommends to use one easy template offered by whatever blogging application you use.

Key Terms: Autonomy-Freedom from external control. Blog- is a web page that individual entries are saved in a database and those entries are then called up and published on the blog according to any criteria including in the database. Real simple syndication- is a file that is automatically updated every time you post something new. Blogging aggregator- it makes it so you only have to check in one place to see all of you favorite bloggers new blogs, such as Google Reader. Blogosphere- it is a blog about what someone else blogs about.