The writing collective: A cross-university collaboration between undergraduate creative writing students

Online publishing platforms present opportunities for emerging writers to both share their work with an audience and to engage in a critical dialogue with peers. However, the potential of these platforms remains largely untapped in a tertiary education environment, even with the increasing focus on online learning. This paper presents the results of a pilot project that matched undergraduate students at a metropolitan university with students at a regionally based university to use the digital platform Wattpad as a site for creative writing peer critique. We found that while Wattpad presents a number of benefits for students engaging both across universities and online, digital spaces present unique challenges for the critique process. Critiquing often relies on trust and personal bonds in order to be effective, and these can be harder to establish in a digital environment. Wattpad also presents barriers to ease of use and ease of communication. From our perspective as facilitators of the Writing Collective, we examine the successes produced by the collaboration, as well as the drawbacks, and suggest further avenues for research.