Last fall, for my first-year writing seminar on the history and mathematics of cryptography, I posted my students' expository-writing essays on our course blog. The assignment had asked students to describe a particular code or cipher that we had not already discussed—how it came to be, how it works, how to crack it, who used it. They described more than a dozen codes and ciphers. It seemed a shame that I might be the only one to read such interesting content, so I asked the students to read and comment on two papers of their peers. The course blog provided an ideal platform for that task. About a week later, one of my students arrived at class excited. He had Googled his paper's topic (the "Great Paris Cipher") and saw that his paper was the third result listed. He said, with a little trepidation, "Some high-school student is going to cite my paper!" Another student asked if I had seen the lengthy comment left on his blog post by a cryptography researcher he had cited. "That's pretty cool that the guy in my footnotes read my paper," he said.
