Whether or not these effects are necessarily advantageous depends on your own view of the educational process and your role as an instructor in that process. Students become passive or grow restless watching a instructor or a student write on a board or overhead. Collectively, these texts provide a transcript of an evolving learning community, which is socially constructing knowledge and negotiating shared meaning and values. Therefore, writers don't write so much to inform or persuade an audience as to fulfill the expectations of the instructor and to get good grades. Knowing that their words will be posted to a public network where peers as well as the instructor may read and respond, writers tend to write with a sense of purpose and feel a stronger urgency to communicate their ideas clearly and effectively.
Students are more likely to understand communication as a social, rather than a solitary, act.
Network writing more closely approximates the discourse style of speech than of academic writing, and often carries over into students' formal writing, making it sound less artificial and falsely stilted. While network writing doesn't automatically confer greater skill in academic writing, this additional practice can reduce writing anxiety as well as provide models for other ways to say things in writing. Collaboration in online environments promotes divergent, associative thinking, which makes the virtual classroom ideal for testing and challenging new ideas. Considerations of gender, race, and physical attributes adversely affect democratic participation. Having an audience other than the instructor also seems to empower students to voice their own opinions.