Digital Learning - beyond eLearning and Blended Learning

For the past few months Michael Drennan's GCSE and A level students have been doing all their writing via student blogs. Writing in classrooms seems to me to have two wildly different, conflicting purposes: a limited, traditional and strict purpose - because exams, like many decent jobs, will be about written skill; and a wider, idealistic one: the ultimate method of exchange of ideas in depth.