How do you evaluate Blogs

Quite often, students are required to blog as part of their coursework. Many staff, as I do, hope that by requiring students to blog initially, over time they’ll start to realise the intrinsic worth of blogging. , However, if we require students to blog, clearly we have to mark blogs, which poses an interesting dilemma, given a blog is essentially personal. How do you evaluate something that is personal?
It’s for this reason that many teachers who use blogging have particular requirements – such as “it should be reflective”, or “you should comment on other’s posts”.
David Warlick looks at this dilemma, pointing to a marking scheme from San Diego State University, which covers different aspects of blogging.
The comments have pointers to quite a few other marking guidelines.