With the recent shift of American schools to online learning, I have been witnessing the use of collaborative intelligence tools from the perspective of both a teacher and a parent. What I have found most impressive is the creation of a student run Discord cloud platform for support and learning. Discord is a community communication/chat site and app where members can communicate via text, voice, or video. Originally designed to bring people together around games, Discord is now being used for a variety of purposes. In one high school, a students created a Discord site for the purposes of socializing and supporting each other during social isolation. There are currenlty over 50 student members and they have created different threads based on their courses of study. Once you are accepted to the community, you can view different sections where you have the ability to both post and read posts regarding the topics and assignments from teachers. This is entirely student run and I'm not sure the school is even aware. These students are enforcing positive interactions within this digital forum and removing participants who are disrespectful or attempting to cheat on an assignment. This is an example of collaborative intelligence on so many levels. There is distributed intelligence, as students all bring different knowledge into the forum. There is peer-to-peer learning, where students act as teachers and learners. This is a community of practice, as students built this community out of interest in learning and remaining connected during this time of social isolation. In that student Discord server, students even have threads related to common interests outside of the academic classrooms, such as video games. This is a community and collaboration tool, allowing students an avenue of connection to support their learning needs.

As a parent, I am impressed by the innovation and social learning. As a teacher, I am disappointed that something like this is not offered by me to my own students. Follow this link at the Discord site to learn more about using Discord in your own classroom. I also found this article: Discord Application: Turning a Voice Chat Application for Gamers into a Virtual Listening Class by Arum Nisma Wulanjani. This article from 2018 is about using Discord as a learning platform, in which teachers can track student collaboration and assist students in devloping those soft skills such as collaboration and communication. It is possible for me to set up a learning platform, but I feel overwhelmed as it is and I am afraid to add another layer that I would have to then manage. One collaboration tool used by my school is Google Classroom. Students have the opportunity to post questions to the teacher or class and they can access assignments and submit work in that one place. I fear that I would have too many places to look in order to keep up with the myriad communication sources. With so many collaboration sites and tools, how do people manage all of the social media and learning offerings? I envision a fluidity to the locations where such social learning is taking place, with the users constantly shifting the focus to a new app or site which meets their needs and interests at the time. There is a constant evolution of collaborative platforms, both created by users and influencing users.