As a new(ish) faculty member I've been told repeatedly to make an effort to make face time with my colleagues, to counteract the distributed character of our workplace. The Landing isn't "face" time but it's not a bad proxy; there's a handful of colleagues I'd say I know better as a result of interacting in the course, and another handful I've met this way. I certainly had no qualms about weighing in on postings of particular interest. (Whether or not those comments were welcome, I can't say, but there's always the delete button, right?)

As for a participatory cycle, the course period coincided with research on social media, literature, and copyright that I presented at Congress. So I found good value in the course's pointers on the linked theoretical and technical aspects of social media, putting these lessons into practice by developing and distributing the Congress work in a range of Landing and non-Landing SNS apps. The extensive commentary prompted by that work (click here and scroll to the bottom third of the page) was its own spin-off crash course in the dynamics of blogging for a large, unknown audience. Different than blogging here, where the audience is at least institutionally defined, if not necessarily well known to me. Subsequently, tweeting my way through Congress was a useful first ... although it usually seemed like there were maybe only a dozen other people doing so. Evidently, it's not just the Landing that need to build its critical-mass capacities.