Zoom's Discord

The industry standard for video conferencing is currently Zoom.

Due to COVID-19, virtual homeschooling is a reality. In my adventures of school design, there is a constant cry over the lack of  'student voice.'  Input needed ranges from curriculum to the physical environment. But we constantly expect the student to come to us, instead of meeting them where they are. In this case, we require them to use our extremely corporate software.

Zoom has some great features and 200 million users, with 81,900 of the customers having 10 or more employees. But when I am not on a conference call (that probably could have been an email) I never use Zoom. When I game with friends, the virtual communication software of choice is Discord.

Discord has a user base of over 250 million registered with 14 million daily active users. Most of that user base was driven by the need to connect with friends playing video games such as Fortnite (or in my case, Rocket League.) Fortnite has 250 million registered players (and has topped at 10.8 million concurrent users.)  The most helpful statistic I've found for my argument is 56% of players are age 10-25.

Unfortunately, I don't have better statistics than this and Discord lacks some of the features that businesses and teachers need at times. However, here is a valid hypothesis: There are MANY more student-aged Discord users than Zoom Users. And discord is constantly updating its technology to meet the demands of its users.

Wouldn't it be beneficial to meet the student where they are?

Intention

Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

 -Blaise Pascal 1657

 (I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.)

I first heard this attributed to Mark Twain somewhere, but regardless of who coined the phrase, it helped me understand something that has make me reluctant to share my writing.

 And as a constraint and an intention for my writings and ideas, I would like to take the time to make them concise and where applicable, link to longer sources/writing.

Plus, it seems that I currently have the time.

On Being Truly Educated

"I think I can do no better about answering the question of what it means to be truly educated than to go back to some of the classic views on the subject. For example: The views expressed by the founder of the modern higher education system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, leading humanist, a figure of the enlightenment who wrote extensively on education and human development and argued, I think, kind of very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively, independently, without external controls.

To move to a modern counterpart, a leading physicist who talked right here [at MIT], used to tell his classes 'It's not important what we cover in the class, it's important what you discover.' To be truly educated from this point of view means to be in a position to inquire and to create on the basis of the resources available to you which you've come to appreciate and comprehend. To know where to look, to know how to formulate serious questions, to question a standard doctrine if that's appropriate, to find your own way, to shape the questions that are worth pursuing, and to develop the path to pursue them. That means knowing, understanding many things but also, much more important than what you have stored in your mind, to know where to look, how to look, how to question, how to challenge, how to proceed independently, to deal with the challenges that the world presents to you and that you develop in the course of your self education and inquiry and investigations, in cooperation and solidarity with others. That's what an educational system should cultivate from kindergarten to graduate school, and in the best cases sometimes does, and that leads to people who are, at least by my standards, well educated."

- Noam Chomsky 

source