Hundreds of alums already have SCCS accounts, and it is pretty simple to get them. And we already have WPMU up and running.

I think a centralized blog would be awesome. That being said, I don’t think it would be good to set it up such that you had to have an sccs account. While many swatties have them, many do not. (Moreover, they’re probably less likely to use that account a long time after they’ve left the bubble. Ideally, a blog of that sort would keep alums of the class connected for a long time, so you wouldn’t want it pegged to an email account that they might let slide)

I’ll also agree that there’s a big difference between the kind of discourse generated from individual blogs versus those maintained collectively by a class. Last year I started students off on the former, then switched formats to a group blog in the second half of the course. Seemed like individual blogs were helpful to some (though not all) in getting their sea legs; but a big refrain of the evals I received was that it was simply too much work for everyone to keep up with (much less comment upon) each other’s postings. To be fair, I’ve run into this problem with old-fashioned discussion board postings; it’s hard to find the ideal ratio between students’ ability to “produce” and “consume” these out-of-classroom conversations.

Miles