Kevin, I believe blogs are great way to connect others by using the "follower" feature and also "member" feature. I have seen blogs used especially by professional artists and illustrators. They will be a great resource for art teachers as well who provide step by step directions. I have used such a blog myself, as part of a group of fellow illustrators and found it to be very interactive and useful. Bloggers are usually sent an alert when new posts are out and so students will know when they need to write a critique in response to a post. It is great way to chronologically show the progress of a set of students over time. Works particularly well with art classes that require a final portfolio.

One resource that I have used as a platform for an online learning community is Moodle, a learning management system. Moddle has an easy to use interface that has the basic infrastructure for online learning. There is the course development section which contains the learning materials, the discussion forums for interacting with classmates and sharing ideas and then there is the grade book where scores are weighted and displayed. What has worked well in the OLC is that students can access materials easily and at anytime. What is challenging is that international students who are enrolled in the course are mostly working asynchronously. This makes it difficult for students to engage in conversation in real-time. Sometimes a day or two passes before a student gets a response. This tends to reduce the social interactions between online students and the students must make a greater effort to communicate via other forms such as skype, instant messaging or email.