How do you gain experience???

I'm a PhD in education student working on my dissertation. My MS and BS were in Information Technology, so between the two i'm close but not quite ID. I'm trying to get some experience and build a working portfolio. I've taught for 5 years as an adjunct but a lot of the work is in the classroom and ad hoc. Does anybody have any tips for building up some credibility? I've considered firing up a Wordpress install and starting to blog about the work I've done and also to put together some tutorials to use as exemplars of work. Would that help?