I've always thought blogs were a great way to get out your ideas to the world and share your ideas. I think one of the big benefits of this class was connecting with my classmates, being able to read their thoughts and "network" a bit with them. Hopefully they will continue after this class and it will continue on. I think personally a blog will be great for me to push out my thoughts to the public on various conferences I goto (I had planned on doing this awhile back but got lazy). Blogging will be a great way to hopefully connect with other peers in my field (online learning technology) and somehow get some conversation going.
I like to thing of blogs as a micro publishing tool. :)