The pedagogical weblog activity may have been chosen to fulfil a role as assessed coursework, whether by asking students to select their best work to be submitted at the end of the course or by tutor-moderated peer assessment (Campbell 2005). In such cases, the blog is not only a process but also a product,3 a distinction made by Smith (2003), who sees the end-goal as important: 'While the process of blogging may be reward enough for some writer and readers, I suspect that for classroom use we must also think of the products.'4
Indeed, there is a concern that setting students a blogging activity that is not assessed is doing the student a disservice: 'The idea of expecting students to spend, no invest, time blogging meaningful messages without offering credit for that investment is, in my opinion, unrealistic.' (Matthew 2005)
Aside from any institutional requirements, the usefulness of assessment may lie in providing the students with a clear reason to engage in the blogging activity. Once engaged, it seems that many will come to see the personal benefits, or at least be required to develop reflective and critical skills. (Campbell 2005)
Such was the outcome of an Open University course, Learning in the Connected Economy, which required students to keep blogs over a period of several weeks. Weller et al. (2004) note that almost all of the students who had initially been unhappy with the idea of an assessed blog 'admitted that they had been 'won over' to the benefits of blogging through the exercise of having to use it and reading the blogs of their peers.'