Yesterday I had one of those "Aha!" moments as I was reading Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. While I follow and learn a lot from many blogs I read, I had never felt the inclination to blog myself. I have read a number of provocative articles on using blogs in the classroom but, again, I was not quite convinced that I wanted to do this.
One of the principles Johnson refers to is how important it is to write everything down. If you don't record your ideas, hunches, and questions when you have them, you will not have a record of your thoughts to bounce future ideas, hunches and questions off of. In Darwin's age (and widely before and after that time), people regularly kept "commonplace books" as records of their thoughts. That practice has long since disappeared, but I imagine that nowadays blogs can serve much the same function, but with a twist. A blog is not only a place where I can record my present thoughts so that my future self can explore them; it is also a place where others can explore what I am thinking. This ability to engage in dialogue is one that has tremendous value, as it gives all of us the potential to make progress connecting ideas more quickly.
I look forward to using this blog to explore this idea more in the future, and I welcome your comments as you travel the road of ideas along with me.
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