Using blogs

I have been getting ready for using blogs in the Learning Pod and have found this research article by Russell Beale, University of Birmingham exactly what I needed to focus my thinking.

http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_hc07_sppaper1.pdf

Russell Beale writes from a higher education setting, but I share his view that blogging should encourage pupils to develop more of a sense of community in their group and that secondly learners will benefit from see the reflections and comments of their peers on learning.

However, whilst I have found the article very useful I also had some reservations about another idea present in the pedagogy. Russell Beale writes,

From a social and pedagogical perspective, blogging provides two advantages. The first is that it can support a sense of community amongst the students. They can read and comment on other students postings, and can learn from both experiences that others have discovered, and from the insights of their peers regarding those experiences. In this way, exceptional students can forge into the unknown, being opinionated, making deep insightful comments on the state of the world, the role of HCI, or anything else, whilst the weaker students are pulled along in their wake, reading and learning, able to make their own sense of things in their own time.

I was immediately uncomfortable with the idea of 'exceptional students' and the way that this classification had implications from the community building objectives of the blogging exercise.

Is it not the case that all my pupils are exceptional?
Shouldn't all of my learners have the opportunity to be opinionated?
Wouldn't it be good if some of the 'exceptional' pupils were 'pulled along in the wake ' of the 'less exceptional'? Wouldn't that be good for their learning experience?
How will the group dynamics be affected if there is an assumption amongst teachers and learners that some learners are exceptional?

On the other hand I can see that within a community of learners , where interaction is being encouraged as a tool for learning, pupils are in the process of learning from one another. Certainly there will be occasions when one pupil or a small group of pupils are lead learners.

It has led me to thinking about how to give every pupil the opportunity to be a lead leader and it has caused me to reflect on the ways in which relationships in a class impact on learning and progress.