Most of the students were quite awkward in their initial blogging. Good students all, the class was a seminar on "Designing for Effective Change" for the Honors Program, but lacking experience in this sort of approach to instruction, the students wrote to their conception of what I wanted to hear from them. I can’t imagine a more constipated mindset for producing interesting prose. For this class there was a need for them to unlearn much of their approach which had been finely tuned and was quite successful in their other classes. They needed to take more responsibility for their choices. While I gave them a prompt each week on which to write, I also gave them the freedom to choose their own topic so long as they could create a tie to the course themes. Upon reading much of the early writing, I admonished many of them to "please themselves" in the writing. I informed them that they could not possibly please other readers if they didn’t first please themselves
I have tried to maintain some semblance of the spontaneous nature of blogging, and an awareness of the many different ways bloggers can blog, by assessing blogs via portfolio.Some students are punctual minimalists (dutifully answering a prompt, and then stopping). Others are eccentric geniuses (who will occasionally write long, thoughtful, passionate pieces, but won't write much at all unless they feel inspired).
Some prefer to blog after class (to post ideas they couldn't formulate on demand in a face-to-face setting), and others draft soliloquies in MS-Word and copy-paste into the blogging form. Still others do their best work in the comments attached their peers' blog entries, or by making lateral connections via hyperlinks.
While I do occasionally post specific prompts, in general all I ask is that students blog SOMETHING for each assigned reading (usually a brief quote from the reading, and a brief statement of what the student would say about their chosen passage, if called on in class).