The theme for this week’s discussion was training. Without our new love, Snowball, we lacked the motivation to actually record our conversation. It’s too bad (imho) because we had some great things to say. Oh well. Here are the highlights (at least, the ideas that I can decipher from my very messy notes).

1. Blog training is not just for students; teachers also need to be trained (and to be willing to do the training). For teachers, training means more than learning the basics; it means learning the specific ways that blogs functions in order to craft assignments that most effectively take advantage of the medium. You can’t just take a writing assignment (or question) that you’ve been using for years, post it on the blog, and then claim you are using blogs to teach.

2. Using blogs in our classrooms and in our own writing/researching, enables us to create spaces that value different epistemic perspectives and encourage a wider range of ways for producing knowledge. We talked a lot about digital storytelling and thinking through/in images. We talked about KCF’s amazing digital story and this intense and inspiring digital story:

Using images and encouraging engaging through images (maybe in conjunction with words and/or voice-overs, like in digital storytelling) provides students and instructors with some others way to express themselves and can speak to their experiences more effectively than traditional methods (lecture, reading dry academic articles).

4. Training involves a wide range of activities, including training students how to:

• do blog basics (posting entries, links, comments, etc)
• think differently about how to engage, how knowledge is and/or could be produced
• think critically about what they are reading, producing and sharing with others
• use links and tags subversively (links: carefully choosing links that direct your readers to feminist voices and perspectives that aren’t often read on topics; tags: deliberately using tags that drive traffic to your site, potentially introducing readers who don’t know what feminism is about
• be confident and excited about experimenting on blogs
• break bad habits: limited ways of knowing/teaching

4. One key purpose of this blog and our book chapter: “It’s an invitation to engage not a how-to manual”

5. Accessibility is not just making things easier for students. Blogging demands hard work and a lot of effort out of students and teachers. But, the hard work can be worth the effort and allows for a different sort of accessibility–accessibility to critical thinking and serious engagement with each others’ ideas. KCF: I remember us saying some great stuff about accessibility as hard instead of easy. I’m not sure I’ve quite captured that discussion. Anything you want to add?

6. A brief list of binaries to bust:

• reason/emotion
• public/private
• easy/hard or hard/easy
• teacher/student
• offline/online

Finally, we had a wonderful musical interlude about midway through our discussion; we got our focus fix: