How do we engage in shared knowledge production?

Last fall, I tried an experiment with my Queering Theory students: I made all of their assignments directly connected to our course blog. At the end of the semester, I asked them to reflect on the process and what they did and didn’t like about our blogging experiement. Many of them wrote about how sharing ideas online through entries and comments helped them to formulate (and/or reformulate) their understandings of the topic of our class: queer/ing. One student described how the blog allowed her to see other students as valuable resources for thinking about what queer could or should mean. Another student reflected on how much writing, reading and commenting on the blog made her feel like she was contributing to a larger understanding of queer. And one other student suggested that the blog was a tremendously freeing space that enabled him and his fellow students to collectively shape their understandings of and engagements with “queer/ing” in the ways that they wanted (and needed).