Jenna,

The questions you are asking here are important ones. As a regular blogger, I do indeed think of my readers as part of a public or a community which I seek to serve and my hope is that they will spread the contents of my blog to other communities to which they also maintain ties. The blog post is simply one step in a relay of information which depends on the active participation of all kinds of readers and writers. For that reason, I regularly search the blogosphere to see how and where people have responded to what I wrote. I also seek ways to incorporate the voices of the community back into the blog, which is why I use so many guest posts and interviews, even conversations between two or more contributors. I maintain a very clear mental image of the range of people who read my blog and try to balance the content I provide in order to reflect the range of interests that have surfaced in the past. The comments which people post on the blog are sparse and I have less time than I would like to respond on that level, but they are simply one trace of the much larger conversation within which a blog participates.

That said, you are right to say that the affordances of web 2.0 should be use when they are useful. There are certainly good reason to contain some kinds of conversations within a more bounded space; students need to rehearse their communications skills before they enter the larger blogosphere; schools have some responsibility to "watch their backs" as they begin to develop more responsibility and deploy more power as communicators in this new and emerging space. But schools should also question the automatic assumption that communication should always occur within the bounded, contained space of the classroom, that academic hierarchies should be retained at all times, that young people are not "ready" to assume public roles, or that the classroom would not benefit from bringing other perspectives and voices into its conversations. There are reasons NOT to use web 2.0 in schools but there are also many good reasons why schools should be considering their potential deployment.

Thanks for the reference to your post Jenna. Just talking to colleagues the other day about some of this as it applies in the workplace (and our extended workplace - the public policy arena). We often hear "I don't do technology" (as if it's all the same thing), or "but our people (customers, etc.) don't use those tools" as if it's a license not to pay attention to conversations about your issues going on outside your sandbox. Certainly there is a correlation between age and comfort-level-with social media, in particular. But I think it's also about upsetting status apple cart. We (my small team) talk about "living in rough draft" or "working out loud" (the name of our blog) to describe the the process of generating wisdom from crowds (sharing ideas to get feedback that makes them better) or engaging people around an idea when we don't have a predetermined next step. But getting many peers and colleagues comfortable with that idea takes leading by example (aka, blind truffle hunting). That means us putting ourselves out there knowing that we might make a huge public mistake that has people rolling in the aisles. In fact, I'm sure that's happened already and we just missed the joke.
Although I, personally, have experienced the frustration of being treated like furniture because I'm holding a camera or twittering on my mobile, I feel like we're finally becoming connected world I've been waiting for my whole life. But this change stuff is as much about culture (norms, habits, frames) as anything.