These brief comments can be hard! 150-200 words is pretty short.

Why are instilling confidence and the desire to experiment with blogs important?

One slogan kept coming up in our discussions about training and blogging pedagogy: “This isn’t a how-to manual; it’s an invitation to engage.” In fact, there can never be a comprehensive how-to manual for blogging while teaching and teaching with blogs in the feminist classroom because blogging technology is always changing and because blogging defies rigid rules. I can (and do) offer up strategies and suggestions to my students, but they can only ever scratch the surface of what is possible (or recommended) for blogs in the feminist classroom.

In my classes I devote serious attention at the beginning of the semester to training students on some basic blogging skills. Then I spend the rest of the semester trying to instill in them an excitement about blogging and a willingness to try out new ways of expressing themselves. I focus considerable attention on the blogs and on discussions of the benefits of blogging. I participate on the blogs a lot and experiment with categories and ways of expressing myself. And I encourage students to be as creative as possible in their entries and comments.

BUSTED BINARY: easy/hard

On using technology to subvert, resist and talk back

SLP: I love how blogs provide us with many different ways in which to subvert dominant forms of knowledge and ways of knowing. For example, in our posts we can link to sources that are not usually read in the university classroom and that are frequently dismissed as not rigorous or serious enough. We can also deliberately use tags that drive traffic to our blog, potentially introducing a wide range of readers to feminism who don’t know what it is about. And we can organize our blogs–through categories, tag clouds, archives, pages–in ways that allow for multiple layers and levels of thinking and knowing to exist beside each other. All of these subversive/resistant practices require that we know enough about the technology (and structure) of blogs to discern some key features of the medium, features that distinguish blogging from other ways of communicating in the classroom. In other words, we need to give serious attention to thinking and theorizing about why and how we blog and to sharing specific tips and strategies with each other.

I added in the busted binary at the end of section one. I am not sure how we want to format it, but I thought it might be cool to mention/visually represent the binaries that we are busting/playing within our brief comments. Any suggestions?