Mandatory Blogging?

Over the past two years, my thoughts around blogging as a learning and networking tool have been slowly evolving.

In Oct 2007, the LCB asked - Should All Learning Professionals Be Blogging? I summarized the responses in: Top Ten Reasons To Blog and Top Ten Not to Blog

At the time, while I felt that blogging was something good to do, I didn't push all that hard. But, slowly I started pointing to:

• Learning and Networking with a Blog (Deleted Scenes)
• Blogging - I'm Pushing Harder Now

Now I'm starting to feel that blogging is such a powerful learning tool that if I was going to send an employee to a conference, I'd want them to use a blog to enhance their learning. If they were starting on some new learning activity, I'd want them to blog.

Certainly in a few cases (formal learning), I've seen blogs be mandated as part of a course. But, otherwise, I've not seen anyone making it mandatory. I'm also thinking that a conference could be a significantly better experience if blogging was essentially mandatory as part of the conference. See Reframing Conference Social Tool Participation and think about the experience if people were blogging and we used an aggregator - ideally pre and post conference as well.

Has anyone else felt this transition from blogging as a nice thing for a few people to something that you want to find ways to force on people?

And Stephen, before you complain about the words force and mandatory, understand that this already happens in classroom settings. I'm extending that same notion to other settings. But I recognize that few (if any) conference organizers would actually go so far as to make it mandatory for attendees. (Although they might if they really wanted to help attendees learn and network.)