As a new year commences, I spend some time thinking about what commitments to carry forward and which ones to leave by the wayside. I think about whether to continue blogging, with such a massive onslaught of people who post messages to this only to promote certain SEO (search engine optimization) links—and who never actually check back to realize that their postings have long vanished and seldom last more than a day or two. The emails I get are about posting commercial messages on the blog site. In the six years that this blog has been live, there have been very few professional communications—much less endeavors—that have come of it.

Am I expecting too much from a blog? Is the blog central to my work? Is it beneficial professionally? Does it add some small potential value to the field? Is it risky to share some ideas? Do I have the right standards for selecting the information that will be used here? Do I sometimes let a spark of miff inform the postings—and so undercut its value? Am I just continuing because there was a chapter written about this blog, and I feel like it would be a disappointment if the blog stopped right after the chapter’s emergence in a journal in late 2011? (A little.)

Meta-Cognition

I realize that I use this blog for what Ronald Heifetz calls “getting on the balcony”—or getting above the daily fray to think about the instructional design work and to draw out informal learning values. This endeavor allows me to mull over the lighter and informal insights from the work in a more disciplined way than just running the ideas through my mind. This blog formalizes a space for reflection. It allows the work day to decide what will be addressed. It allows a level of professional whimsy that I would not have in my more formal reflection spaces.

A lot of learning goes on with ideas flitting across our conscious minds and then wholly disappearing. If something is learned only in passing but not remembered, it doesn’t really do much good. It helps to notice first of all. Having a blog provides a light rationale for paying attention in order to abstract practical and theoretical ideas. It helps one work on “takeaways” from a potential learning situation. So much learning in a professional role cannot truly be anticipated or understood unless you are in the field and actually working towards solving particular issues and actualizing particular goals. It is also hard to assess the relative value of different insights without some way to collect the thinking and then to search through the various elements.

A blog site is conducive not only to collecting insights but to searching it again for some learning that may be useful later on. I’ve gone back to IDOS to find an informal book review or two to cite in a more formal work. The blog has been a kind of memory aid when I remember a snippet of an idea but not the full facts (as recorded).

[On a more formal level, writing up research provides a similar space for more formal rumination. These encapsulate ideas for which one has to stand (and maybe defend) formally. As such, these limit explorations to ideas that have some rigor and some academic value.]

“Heuristic” research—as a subset of qualitative research—emphasizes the act of finding or discovery in experiences and in problem-solving. It is not exhaustive learning. It may or may not be fully generalizable—given the quality of the immersion and then the analytical depth of the researcher. Heuristic research is about building a knowledge base built up on firsthand experiences. Ideally, this could result in the emergence of various grounded theories. However, this may all be easier conceptualized than executed.

Detaching from Prior Work

Finally, having a blog offers a healthy way of letting go of projects once they wrap. At heart, each instructional design project is just a job. One does one’s best to complete the work to standards and moves on. There is something cathartic about recording ideas in a way that may have found a small audience somewhere.

In fact, the heuristic research idea is a new one, and it is an overlay over the existing structure of a blog that has now existed some six years and is heading into its seventh—lots of Internet “dog years” if one were to count. No specific research has come from this but just a journal article about the origins and evolution of this work. While this has benefitted me professionally in terms of my own evolution as an instructional designer, I wonder if the same effect could be achieved in a private electronic journal or a blog with an authentication layer. Would the contents change if I didn’t have to think of a potential audience? (And yet my training has been to always consider an external audience, so this is only a simple “thought experiment.”)