Hey KCF, feel free to take my 11 leftover words (ha ha). But seriously, here’s the revised version of my intro. Here’s what I changed: made how I use blogs about my students, and not just me + added in a few sentences at the end. I will bold what I changed/added:

Last summer I fell in love with blogging. Sure I had been using blogs in my classes since January 2007, but it wasn’t until I started writing in my own blog in May 2009 that I realized what a powerful space for radical transformation, critical and creative expression and community-building it is. Now it is over a year later and blogs play a central role in all aspects of my life as a thinker, learner, writer, teacher and researcher. I write in three of my own blogs and I make blogs a central part of all my classes.

I use my personal and course blogs to encourage myself and my students to archive our ideas, to document our research, to put seemingly disparate ideas or representations into conversation, to offer up various accounts of ourselves, to build relationships with visible and invisible/known and unknown readers, to experiment with pedagogical techniques, to cultivate effective writing and thinking habits, to disrupt the rigid rules and disciplinary borders that discourage new ideas and unexpected connections, to lay bare our own thinking and writing process, to practice what we teach (and preach), to develop connections between our different selves, and to remind ourselves that being thinkers/learners/teachers can be energizing and fun.

In addition to all of these reasons, writing on my own blogs and using blogs in the classroom enables me to access my feminist troublemaking self. Through blogging, I reject rigid boundaries between disciplines, find creative ways to connect my research with my life, and infuse my ideas with a sense of humor. I play with what should count as rigorous scholarship or as proper objects of study. I cultivate a curiosity about the world that is motivated by a desire for engaging and experimenting with ideas as opposed to acquiring knowledge. And I invite my fellow bloggers (inside and outside of my classes) to join me at an experimental and unsettling space where we strive to remain open to new ideas and to critically exploring the limits of our own perspectives.

I tried to weave in a little more of my troublemaking inspiration: Kevin Kumashiro and his promotion of troubling education through promoting the class as an experience instead of a space to acquire facts or positions. Was I effective?