Contributing to the Thousands of Invisible Threads Using Blogs to Help Students Engage in the Professional Community of Practice by Joanna C. Dunlap, CPT, PhD “We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.” —Herman Melville I enjoy exploring the educational potential of blogs and blogging. Blogs are web-based journals in the form of frequent, chronological publications of thoughts and ideas, typically within a specific theme or area of interest. I have a professional blog—called Thoughts on Teaching—that I use to collect, organize, and share my ideas about postsecondary teaching. I have also established other blogs alone and with colleagues on a variety of topics and serving a variety of purposes. Because I find them such an effective tool, I frequently ask my instructional design and technology students to contribute to their own blogs. Besides being an effective tool for reflective journaling, blogging helps me and my students accomplish several objectives: It requires the articulation of ideas and perspectives, encouraging us to be brave and bold about our contributions to the greater discourse. It engages us in reflection on the domain, requiring us to critically analyze ideas, perspectives, theories, research, and designs. It makes our thinking visible, and this public context encourages a unique caliber of thoughtfulness that does not typically happen in private journals. It reminds us that we are contributing members of a professional community, using our blogs as (1) vehicles for idea dissemination, (2) avenues for garnering feedback from colleagues, and (3) opportunities for collaboration with colleagues. It helps us establish ourselves as knowledgeable practitioners, and helps us develop positive professional reputations. It helps us express ourselves in professional and articulate ways. It also requires us to make time for writing, organize our writing, and develop a habit of writing. It helps us develop the skills and dispositions needed to use technology in support of self-expression, inquiry, knowledge construction, and collaboration, and use these technologies to support lifelong learning endeavors. A specific way I use blogging with students is to have them keep ideation or design sketchbook blogs. The purpose of this type of blog is to establish a personal gallery of ideas and resources that serves as inspiration during instructional design projects. Also, these blogs can be used to track and share decisions and rationales during an instructional design project. For example, I establish course-specific blogs where I share my course design decisions and rationales, and my thoughts about the effectiveness of course components as the course is in progress; see my IT 5130 Design Ideation Journal for a current example. Modeling reflective practice, this allows students to read my thinking about what works and does not work, what I would do differently, and so on.