During this period we have explored blog writing in a group environment. Ofcourse, this has both its benefits and challenges. Overall, it was a nice experience. It was especially fun to get acquainted with blog writing, as opposed to the academic writing that we have done for the whole of our university career. 

In our group, we faced a couple of challenges – read: challenges, not problems – because overall the collaboration went very well. The first challenge arose at the very beginning, when we had to form groups, based on the research we had done during the first period of this academic year. There was the ambition to form a group out of Dutch people, as we wanted to write our blog in Dutch. This was, however, not really possible as the themes of our research did not correspond with each other too well. When the groups had formed around the themes, the three of us remained. We found that there were no other people that fitted with the three topics that we had, and so we decided to stick as a group. In the end, we managed to create a fusion of all of our themes, while still doing three of them justice. Through the self-made subject of layered literacy, we could capture family literacy, reading for pleasure and the relation between criminality and low literacy. 

Another challenge was that we chose to write the blog in Dutch. Although this was a really nice experience, it was also challenging. As it had been a while since any of us had written a considerable amount in Dutch, we really had to refresh our memory. Furthermore, we have written our literature reviews in English, so we had to translate some of our sources. The positive side of writing in Dutch was that we got the opportunity to catch up on our writing skills in our first language. Overall, we are happy we decided to write in Dutch, even though it was not the easiest way of making the blog. 

As mentioned before, overall our collaboration went great. However, we experienced a couple of challenges. For example, we had a different writing pace, so our blog posts were not finished at the same time. Furthermore, if we had more similar speeds, we could have written our posts more interconnected, instead of making it a coherent blog at a later stage. Finally, more group meetings could have been helpful to make sure we are all on the same page and to write our common parts together. Furthermore, we could have planned our final meeting further ahead than we did, which would have granted us more time for the finishing touch. 

If we were to write a blog as a group again, we would not mind having a group with very different topics, because it forced us to think out of the box, and led to a lot of creativity. It even caused us to come up with a whole new term: “layered literacy”. We would also still choose to do it in Dutch, as it was nice to write in our first language. Regarding the collaboration, we could maybe improve our communication, to make sure the timing and coherency would be optimal.