KCF: The process of writing this article has been a journey of collaboration on many levels. I have really responded to the process of working together and the use of different venues for conversation (blogging, writing together, conversing in person and online) have really allowed me to think about how ideas grow, evolve, and become shared. I have really appreciated how my conversations in all of these areas have really helped me shape my ideas on the value of blogging in my personal life (which reminds me I need to attend to LKC more!) and the need for using blogs in our courses. In essence, this is the busting of many binaries but in particular the I/You binary, which so often seems to challenge collaborative work.

SLP: I like how you mention that we bust/challenge/play with the I/You binary. Through our collaborative process, we have been able to push at our own understandings and develop new, shared ideas as well. Our collaboration hasn’t been one in which our ideas have been fused together, however. We have been able to hold on to our own unique positionalities, even while we engage in creating shared visions of VCR or accessibility.

KCF: I definitely agree with your assessment. I really appreciate how you mentioned the structure of our article here reflects different levels of collaboration and writing. Our first part emerges out of conversations that we really developed together, the second part is fragmented in our dialogue that we wrote in response to our questions and then this last part is a cyber/reality merging of ideas. Similar to the ways that we say we like to model blog use for our students by writing on our own blogs, “It’s Diablogical!” has really created multiple ways for us to also make visible our collaborative process and has busted (maybe redefined?) the cyberspace/reality binary.

SLP: Yes! Thanks for mentioning that. Something else I love about this collaborative project/process is how it enables us to experiment with news ways to express ourselves and to push at the limits of what counts as academic writing. Quite frequently I find that academic journal writing is not fun, just painful. I never found this process to be painful. In fact, it was often fun. And it still allowed us to be very critical, creative and productive.

KCF: Something that really sticks out of me from your response is the combination of critical, creative, and productive. I like that idea, it seems like often times if you’re engaging in academic writing this means that it has to look a certain way. We challenged this from the beginning when we proposed in our abstract that we wanted to have an engaged dialogue for our written chapter. I think we’ve also challenged this through the creative visual look of our blog, and the creative approaches we have taken in producing our shared knowledges about blogging while teaching and teaching while blogging. I too agree, this has been fun, and it’s necessary that this collaboration continue.

SLP: I definitely want to continue our collaboration. I am learning so much about my own pedagogy/teaching practices and how I want to continue to experiment with blogs. Our collaboration exceeds the boundaries of this particular writing project; in fact, we have already started working on another writing project. I have also been inspired to take ideas from our blog and incorporate them into both of my syllabi for the upcoming semester.

KCF: I think that is definitely a byproduct of doing collaborative work! While we have had many informal conversations about blogging (in multiple ways) this project has also helped me to make more concrete commitments to blogging in my life and through my course blog. We have created new assignments for course blogs and our conversations have created new visions for my personal blog and I think this could only occur through our focused engagement on blogging in relation to feminist pedagogy. I also think in sharing our ideas with one another we have created a really great network between ourselves and other feminist colleagues, friends, and peers, who are also interested in these issues. I see the value in sharing our experiences on using blogs in these multiple ways to help further expand feminist commitment to these types of collaborations, shared knowledge productions, and interactions with technology.

SLP: Sharing and engaging are very important elements of blogging for me. Even though I didn’t start my trouble blog as a way to share with others (instead I felt compelled to write, process and document all of my ideas and research), the fact that you were a faithful reader and commenter encouraged me to keep writing. From that experience and from our collaboration this summer, I have become even more committed to blogging and to the belief that blogging demands that we share, connect and engage with others.

KCF/SLP: Through our conversations on blogging, feminist pedagogy, accessibility, technology, virtual consciousness raising, and busting binaries we have exposed how the power of collaboration continues to shape our ideas on these topics. In many ways this is not a how to guide, but rather an invitation to engage. We invite anyone who is interested in these same ideas to join our conversation on “It’s Diablogical!”