Hi Friend!

So the craziness of the semester has begun and I am overwhelmed! It has been definitely too long since I wrote on this blog (or talked with you online/offline). This semester I have upped the ante in my classes (which I seem to do every year because I LOVE experimenting and pushing at the limits of what is possible–and advisable). Here’s a recent twitter post on my blog/twitter craziness:

Anyway, our conversations this summer have been amazingly helpful for my teaching and thinking and writing in so many ways. Here’s just one very recent example. Right before I started this post, I replied to a class tweet by linking to two of my entries from here.

The tweet: found @femped2010

My response:

Since I made these images, you can’t click on the links above. But here they are:
SLP’s revised intro in 339 words
My Feminist Self/Selves

What a great tweet question from the student, huh? It was cool to be able to readily provide my own answer (which admittedly still needs work) and to offer a model for one way of answering this important question.

Now, speaking of twitter, you (KCF) asked me, via twitter (@undisciplined), how twitter was working out in my classes. So far, so good. I have had some issues with hashtags (they weren’t working), but I finally got almost everyone in my classes on our class lists. You can check them out here: FemPed2010-class list and Qued2010-class list. Since I have never done this in a class, and since I just started using twitter myself this summer, I’m not sure how it will work. I think one important thing that I want to really emphasize is using twitter in concert with our blog; they need to be in conversation with each other.  Here’s one idea that I am thinking of using for my queering desire class:

Using twitter to craft a self: Towards the end of the semester, they would be required to put together a brief (around 400-500 word) narrative about the version of their self that has been created/crafted/performed through twitter. They will do this by drawing on the tweets (they have to do at least 10) that they posted throughout the semester. This narrative will be posted on our blog.

Using twitter to define a concept: Another option that just came to me as I was writing this paragraph is for them to use the tweets from class to develop a tentative definition of queer/ing. Through their careful reflection on/analysis of our class-list tweets over the semester, they would be required to write a brief entry-essay (400-500 words) in which they answer the question: what is queer?

Now, these ideas just came to me and I need to think them through some more. What do you think? And how are your classes going, Dr. KCF?