Blogging Up a Storm - A Recipe for Growth

The Basic Ingredients – Blogging and Professional Development

Whenever I create something, whether it’s a home cooked meal or a blog post, I like to start with the basics. Just as I gather all of my main ingredients for my tomato bisque, the same applies to blogging. So, I need to start by defining my terms. According to Wikipedia, a blog or weblog is “a web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video”. OK, that’s fairly straightforward. But this definition also points out that ‘blog’ can be used as a verb “meaning to maintain or add content to a blog”. Hold the salt! I’ll come back to this idea in a minute.

Adding professional development to the mix means adding the “skills and knowledge attained for both personal development and career advancement.” In this post, I hope to explore what can be created when blogging and professional development are combined.

Blog Reading Versus Blog Writing – Is There a Difference?

At first look, ‘blogs for professional development’ and ‘blogging for professional development’ are different. But are they? Is one passive and the other active? Not necessarily. I would suggest that they are one in the same. If you are truly participating in blogs, then you are reading, commenting and responding to comments. Likewise, if you are truly ‘blogging’, then you are posting, reading comments and responding to comments. It’s one in the same and is in fact a never-ending circle. For example, ‘Orange Guy’ and ‘Blue Guy’ in the diagram below are fully engaged in blogging. Whereas ‘Turquoise Guy’ just reads blogs but doesn’t comment or post.



Why Blog for Professional Development?

What did we ever do before the Internet and Web 2.0 technology? If I stretch my mind back to my practice teaching experiences, I seem to remember keeping a reflective journal (in a notebook) to document my triumphs, tragedies and learning. Although it was full of insights and discoveries, they were only shared between my instructor and me. Lord knows where that journal is today! These days, I am blogging as a means of professional development. Here’s what blogging for pro-d is doing for me:

It is a permanent, accessible record of ideas that is not only available for the user, but to all who are interested.

It is opening me up to many more possibilities for learning and sharing since I have a much bigger and more interactive audience.

Having a potentially large and authentic audience makes me want to do my best by being knowledgeable about my subject and by communicating effectively to that audience.

It encourages me to try new things and seek out other sources of information as the edublogosphere is so interconnected.

It has helped me to find my voice through articulating my philosophy of educational technology by finding evidence to support that philosophy.

Blogging for pro-d makes it easier to locate ideas and resources using the computer as a tool for searching through reams of information.

But there’s more to this recipe…

Will Richardson’s blog post, Blogs for Professional Development maintains that blogging can aid with staff development presumably through the sharing of ideas and resources. He references Karl Fisch, another well-known edublogger. Fisch relates that blogs are a central part of his work as a reflective practitioner as they assist him and his colleagues to “create community around common goals” such as student use of technology, implementing curriculum and preparing students for the future.

I thought that Lesley Instone put forward some great reasons for using blogging in professional development. In her article, Conversations beyond the classroom: Blogging in a professional development course, she offers these three reasons why blogging is beneficial to pro-d:

Flexibility – learners do not have to learn according to a linear schedule; balance constraints of personal and professional lives; can read, share and learn at their own pace

“Creating a knowledge community” – this goes beyond something learned in a course or a workshop – it can endure and can create a supportive learning community

“Conversation as learning” – blog formats are less formal, not constrained, more dialogue than monologue.

In the article, Building Virtual Communities by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, she offers some interesting points on blogging and pro-d. Educators can:

Create communities not from common locations but from common interests

Advocate for educational reform as one voice becomes many voices

Bring about change - virtual learning communities are the movers and shakers in terms bringing in new ideas.

I’ve got the cookbook and the ingredients – it’s time to cook

As a classroom teacher and an emerging teacher-librarian, I see many practical applications of blogging for professional development. In my current position as a teacher, blogging can help me to:

Find others who are teaching the same subjects

Share resources and not reinvent the wheel

Use and develop best practices

Get help and give and receive advice

In my future role as a teacher-librarian, blogging will enable me to:

Feel less isolated by creating connections with other TLs

Stay current and relevant in my field

Promote the library as a welcoming learning environment

Be an educational leader and resource person

Connect staff members to materials and to each other

Clearly articulate a mission, provoke readers to take action and can create opportunities for learning (book reviews, book chats and lesson sharing), according to Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach

Use staff blogs to “…foster improved staffwide communication and camaraderie”, as noted by Sophie Brookover.

Tweaking the Recipe

Blogging is becoming more and more a part of educators’ daily lives. But is the recipe just right? Blogging for professional development clearly has many strengths, such as accessibility, immediacy and opportunity for collaboration. But, it isn’t as easy as apple pie. The challenges that remain for me, and many bloggers, are how to get full participation from those readers who don’t feel they have anything of value to add or who don’t feel it’s worth the effort to comment. The solution? Set the right tone in the blog to encourage participation and provide an RSS feed for users to subscribe to your blog.

Blogging and pro-d - bon appétit!

Article Cited

Brookover, S. (2007). Why We Blog, Library Journal, 132(19), 28. Retrieved November 21, 2008 from Proquest Educational Journals database.