Teaching and learning with social media

During a large undergraduate course I was teaching in 2005, a group of students approached me and asked that I remove their blogs from the course list. It was easy enough in this case: the blogs were not required. Blogging had been provided as an opportunity to replace one of the exams in the course. But I was curious as to the reasons. Was it because the topic of the course-online pornography-was too risqué? Was it because it made them uncomfortable to share their discussions with a public audience? No, it was just that these students thought of their blogs as somehow separate from their academic lives, and wanted to maintain that separation. They had not realized this until several weeks into the course. They remained active in discussions, and in fact continued to talk about the topics we covered on their now independent blogs, but had no interest in having those discussions graded or count for course credit.