Beginning is the hardest part of any task…

After a reflection session with the members of our group, we concluded that we all agree that the most challenging part was getting organized, and therefore getting started proved challenging. All of us have different schedules when it comes to school, and then various activities to consider outside of school. We started with sharing our understanding/expectation of how this task will be tackled, and then tried to find a day to meet. In our case, all our meetings were online since some were unable to attend physically.

Once we did meet, everybody was still a bit lost and had different views despite the written brainstorm session in the group chat. Further, we had not really met each other before nor been in a tutorial group together prior to this, so it took some time for us to be comfortable to freely share ideas with each other. After some time, we did reach a mutual understanding of how to link our topics together and try to make a coherent blog.

However, since we did not actually have the individual blogposts written yet we only got a half-good About section. You can also imagine how abstract it still was for us, and actually syncing our posts and creating a dialogue was also difficult. Especially since all of us have different work paces and ways of doing tasks, it took us a while to get to a place where we could read each other’s posts and then again try to work on the structure and the internal dialogue between the posts more concretely. You know how it is…

This was not our first task where we had to organize ourselves as a group to work on an assignment, but it was more difficult as the task and the texts required so much dialogue to be coherent. We also agreed that we could have talked some more before or during the post writing process, since that would have made it easier for us. What we did was to work more individually and then afterwards try to organize it, no doubt resulting in more work or not as well structured coherence.

Experience acquired, for sure

As a final point, even though it was very difficult to make a coherent structure with various links to each other’s points (and to the other topics within Literacy by other groups!), it was like engaging in a puzzle. It was actually a quite fun task to occupy your mind with and the problem solving, but then add the necessity for communication without being in the same room (nor countries!).

Finally, the comment section proved a challenge as people sometimes asked questions that required us to go back and re-read the literature to refresh or memories, or even find new literature for some contexts. This proved to be time consuming, but for sure a nice taste on how it is being an “expert” on some topic and managing your blog about it.

Thanks for reading our blog on Education and Literacy!

– Amanda, Gonzalo, Gabbie and Nick