Spiraling into Academic Blogging

After reading this post on academic blogging and this post on the spiral metaphor, I realized these concepts explained by Dr Burton go hand in hand. I'm just going to liken this to a spiral staircase because I'm visual like that.

The first part of our spiral staircase began in phase one. Each individual step was made up of our individual posts not necessarily consistently focused on one idea or theme. As we continue our climb up these steps to the second level right above the landing, we enter phase two of academic blogging. But we wouldn't have gotten to phase two without those steps in phase one. And we can climb back down the spiral stairs to look at points we made in phase one to carry with us in phase two. We develop our ideas. We use crowdsourcing (an idea we learned about in the first third of class, the first few steps of our spiral) and social proof (an idea we've just learned about) to get feedback and create a feedback loop.

(oops not stairs but you get the idea)

After we get public opinion (whether from our "homies, peers, enthusiasts, or experts") our spiral continues to grow into things phase three and beyond. I think what lies ahead can be daunting. You do get further and further away from the ground level as you climb up those spiral steps. But you can always step back down to refer to earlier notes, posts, links, and ideas to get your footing again.