Outside of academia, blogging can be generally assumed to be a self-motivated activity. The individual will choose a means of publishing the blog and will have complete control over the content and frequency of the entries. Willingness of students to engage with a course-related blog might be considered to depend on a similar level of control, particularly when examining discussions concerning the e-portfolio's role in promoting reflective learning, which suggest that sufficient ownership of process and product is required to motivate learners. (Barrett and Carney 2005, Kimball 2005, Tosh et al. 2005)
The Brisbane Graduate School of Business MBA blog project took this approach, with few guidelines provided beyond how to use the software: it was decided that the blog ought to be as student centred as possible, with the students themselves determining what shape and form the blog should take. The authors noted that a desire for more guidance and structure emerged as a common theme in participant feedback. (Williams and Jacobs 2004)
This was similar to the experience of Steven Krause, recorded in When Blogging Goes Bad. Krause's weblog assignment did not make any specific requirements from his group either in frequency, content or indeed any other aspect, and he comments that setting up subject groups on the first day was 'a quick and somewhat haphazard exercise, and I tried to make it clear that students were more than welcome to drift away from this initial focus.'
Krause was disappointed in the outcome of the blogging activity, which he blamed on the 'vagueness' of his 'open-ended and unformed writing assignment': When this was discussed with the group, 'they more or less said that they needed the direction of a teacherly assignment to write, and they weren't going to "just want to write" in a blog space...just because they were given the opportunity.'