Mark kindly made me aware of this discussion by email, so I thought I'd add my 2 cents...
The reason I'm doing what I'm doing with my Year 10 History students is engagement, but also to pioneer ways of working that may become more mainstream in future. I'm a member of Futurelab's Teachers as Innovators programme and am writing my Ed.D. thesis on what it means to be 'educated' in the 21st century. The point made above about plagiarism is a good one: students need to be able to use online resources critically and effectively and not just plagiarise them. Any student who plagiarises most of their blog posts have to do it again.
I'm trying to make them independent learners and, to an extent, it's succeeding. Homework isn't an issue any more because both I and the students know before they walk in the door of my classroom whether they've done it or not. Again, as mentioned above, I just subscribe to the RSS feed of each student's blog plus the feed for the comments. These are then organised into folders in my Google Reader account.
Yes, it took some setting up and a while to iron out problems. But I think it's going to be worth it in the long-run. The wiki (http://gcsehistory.wikispaces.com) which we've got is going to prove invaluable for coursework photos, sources, etc. after our visit to Lincoln in a couple of week's time. I'm going to get them to Bluetooth their images and videos on the bus to my new Nokia N95 on the way back...
