I wrote a personal post on my interest in exploring the idea of walk blogging. I received a note from a fellow literacy educator, Wendell Dryden, who wrote:

Years ago, a colleague and I used to take 40 min weekend walks through a nature park, and found this undisturbed time useful for "staff meetings" of a sort. The natural beauty and physical exercise was a wonderful tonic. We were able to talk through challenges, frame responses to questions arising, and dream a little for the future. We used my digital camera which, as a video recorder, also doubled as an audio recorder, to capture language or ideas we didn't want to forget before getting back to the office.I hadn't thought about those walks in a while. Thanks for reminding me that walking often makes thinking and talking easier. :)

This has been on my mind for the last while, and I came across Barbara Ganley's recent post, Tacit and Tangible: Two Sides of the Creative Teacher explores her journey of self-discovery, and her struggles to balance her various roles: that of the academic, and that of the artist.

"I am sloughing off my academic self for someone who works in the unpredictable, shifting spaces of local community and personal creativity, and some days I'm just plain old nowhere."

For me, Barbara Ganley represents the personal blogger, who is embracing the liminal, transformational spaces, and engaging in the process of soul-making, in deep self-reflection and sense-making. She is exploring her ideas candidly, engaging in reciprocal relationships of learning pairings, and she seems quite adept in moving between spaces, adopting and shedding multiple roles and identities. From Barbara Ganley's blog, I found Jennifer Jones' creative collaborators blog, Jentropy. This blog also inspired me, in that it provides an active, running example of a learning space devoted to collaborative sharing, where writers engage in mutual support and offer synergistic feedback.

Barbara Ganley's reflections, and Jennifer Jones' creative works, provide exemplars for how learners should strive to use blogging as their own personal learning toolbox. Both engage in different aspects of what I have come to realize are different aspects of our pursuit of truth. Through BGBlogging, for example, Barbara Ganley engages in the act of self-making through reciprocal learning partnerships. Using Jentropy, Jennifer Jones engages in the journey of self-making through embedded, collaborative sharing circles.

My thinking is that the personal blogger cycles between private blogging, moving to more public blogging in anonymous forums, to moving fully into the public spotlight, before moving once again away from the spotlight.This is the nature of the transformative blogging cycle.