Blogs: Enhancing links in a professional learning community of science and mathematics teachers

Anyone who can access the Internet can be part of the knowledge-access, knowledge-building, information-exchanging culture, regardless of location. Time magazine’s latest “Person of the Year ” is “You”(Grossman, 2006). In a startling acknowledgement that “community and collaboration on a scale never seen before ” has trumped any famous individual, the editorial board elected to pay tribute to the power of the World Wide Web—and some of its most famous creations such as Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace, and Web logs or blogs. This research is about blogs and their use in a new teacher professional development project. Weblogs were first named and described in 1997 by Jorn Barger (Blood, 2000) and then shortened to blogs by Peter Merholz in1999. According to well-known New York Times journalist Tom Friedman (2005), blogs and “wikis ” or Wikipedia (from the Hawaiian word for “quick”), the online encyclopedias created by intellectual commons collaboration, are two examples of how computer technology is contributing to the “flattening ” of the world. Compared to other online discussion tools, blogs are easy to use and involve little cost. This research describes how blogging was used to help launch