V.W.H. Campbell, Post-Gazette Seton Hill associate professor Dennis Jerz talks with Jason Pugh, of West Mifflin, and Meredith Harber, of Marion Center. The two students were in his class this semester. Click photo for larger image. Related coverage Colleges using blogs to attract students

Jessica Prokop thought the textbook for her class at Seton Hill University was biased and that its author "seems like a bitter man." In the annals of student rants, nothing extraordinary there.

Except she didn't just blurt out those words in her journalism class. She blogged them. Soon, the author himself was responding all the way from England, pledging to re-examine an upcoming edition given her critique.

Junior Mike Rubino got a more extreme lesson about free speech in the blogosphere. His "10 reasons why Seton Hill doesn't need a football team," including a claim that "jocks" would bring more drugs, alcohol and fights to campus, irked arriving players who found his Internet posting months later.

"I even got calls to my room," he said. "They talked to my roommate, thinking it was me, saying things like they're going to kick my butt."

Awkward encounters? Sure. But instances such as these are providing teachable moments for faculty at a growing number of colleges nationwide, including Seton Hill. There, a professor and his prolific community of student bloggers are exploring the good and the ugly about a rough-and-tumble form of Internet discourse whose popularity has exploded.

Since he arrived two years ago, Dennis Jerz, 37, an associate professor of English and an avid blogger, has made his mark on the 1,900-student Catholic campus in Greensburg: One in six undergraduates now has a blog, short for Web log, made available through the campus computer network.

The number of these academic blogs at Seton Hill has grown largely because Dr. Jerz requires them in most of his literature, writing and new media journalism classes. Completing assignments using blogs allows students to view each other's work and better prepares them for classroom discussion, he said.

But every so often, something unexpected happens and a broader discussion ensues.

Students find that their musings on topics from Plato to video games have been discovered by a parent back home who typed their name into a search engine such as Google. Or they'll discover their homework was incorporated hundreds of miles away into a stranger's Internet research.

"In another generation, these students would have simply been users of a computer," Dr. Jerz said. "Now, they are co-creators of the Internet."

That is both good and bad.

"I remind students that their blogs are public," he said. "Someday, they'll be in a job applicant pool, and a potential employer will run their name through Google, and the angry ranting Web log they wrote at age 17 will turn up."

By all accounts, there has been exponential growth in the number of blogs, where people post everything from vacation photos to amateurish poetry to scathing political commentary, often with frequent updates and room for others to post responses. There are almost 24 million blogs, nearly double the number from five months ago, with 70,000 new blogs created daily, according to Technorati, a San Francisco-based Web site that tracks them.

Maybe it's no surprise, given how empowering it can be to have one's own thoughts transported instantly across the globe. But once there, they become fodder for anyone who is inclined to turn an author's words against him.

"All they have to do is print it out and they have proof," Milwaukee lawyer Scott Taylor said.

His client, a Marquette University dental student, recently was suspended for the balance of the school year and told he must retake the fall semester for posting criticisms about classmates and professors on a private site. He never named the individuals, Mr. Taylor said, but Marquette, nevertheless, deemed him to be in violation of campus codes.

In Pittsburgh, Duquesne University disciplined a student and ordered him to write a term paper. The offense: Posting disparaging remarks about gays on his account with www.Facebook.com, a Web site for social networking that is popular with students.

Those cases, and others like them, illustrate the importance of what some say is an emerging campus trend: Faculty are discussing with their students how the medium is transforming free speech.

"It's a substantial change in how we engage in discourse, especially in this country," said Alex Halavais, an official with the Association of Internet Researchers who teaches at the University at Buffalo, part of The State University of New York. "As such, I think universities have a duty in some ways to provide students with the tools they need to better participate in that discourse."

Student conduct codes and computer use policies are applicable to blogging, experts say, and it's probably not hard to make a compelling case for why posting a video of your roommate having sex is a bad idea.

But it's next to impossible to legislate how people generally communicate, including what they post on their blogs, be it intimate family secrets or diatribes against the boss.

"We can't give them rules any more than we can tell them, 'You can't print up a flier and take it outside,' " said Amy Eisman, director of writing programs with the school of communication at American University, were she works with bloggers in class.

She said students were more likely to discover boundaries themselves, sometimes by a rough experience.

That happened at the University of South Carolina, when student bloggers who linked themselves to an off-campus political site had their writing mercilessly picked apart, each grammatical error held up for ridicule on the Web.

"It was pretty brutal, basically 'What are you doing in college?' That sort of thing," said Karl Fornes, an English professor at South Carolina's Aiken campus. "I talked to the students about it. They were upset."

He offers students simple advice such as this: "If they present themselves as intelligent thinking human beings, they will be rewarded. If not, then they won't be," he said.

At Seton Hill, students who blog under titles such as The Gentle Giant and Thoughts of a Cynical Bastard get wide latitude as long as they adhere to student conduct codes. To encourage accountability, they must include their names, rather than post anonymously.

Of the 11,000 blog entries created the past two years, Dr. Jerz said, maybe two or three came close to a violation. Others, at least, gave pause.

One student posted a politician's picture modified to include a Nazi swastika. Another blogged about a family dispute over Thanksgiving, and the hostilities resumed when relatives stumbled on it, Dr. Jerz said.

Still, most blog entries are routine, such as a list of what not to miss about high school ("disgusting bathrooms," for one) prepared by Kayla Sawyer, 18, a freshman from Madison, Ohio, and another student's discovery of a parallel between Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman" and her own father.

The humor can be biting. The fact that Seton Hill would play its inaugural football season at a high school field wasn't lost on Mr. Rubino, 20, a junior from Monaca, as he panned the whole idea. "Hey," he wrote. "Doesn't having a football team require, oh I don't know, a football FIELD?"

Students can easily get blogging tips from Dr. Jerz, a thin man with a rapid delivery who, in one class, stopped mid-speech to tell his students apologetically: "Not everyone is as excited about blogs as I am."

His own blog is a window into his work and personal life, with academic writings and family photos, including some taken minutes after the family car overturned on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in June. There's even a photo of "the comfy chair," one of two blue-floral cushioned seats that are easy on the rear, if a bit at odds with Dr. Jerz's office decor.

Jason Pugh, 20, a junior from West Mifflin, said he'd watched the level of discourse rise as freshmen come to campus and see how upperclassmen build reasoned arguments. "There's a difference between just saying, 'You're wrong,' and saying, 'I disagree because of point one and point two,' " he said.

He views his own blogs as a far cry from the all-opinion rants of his freshman year. "I've learned to do better research, so I don't sound like I'm someone angry at the world."