Bailey and Bullington's transition to Discord as a tool for teaching and research was a sudden one, much like so many other programs 'discovered' during quarantine. However, this discovery proved a more flexible and fluid alternative to Zoom, allowing us to plan and improvise both during our first pandemic semester and beyond.Discord worked as a great collaboration tool for student-student projects, student-librarian or student-preceptor interactions, and student-faculty learning experiences. It even provided a great home for collaborative research and publication using text, audio and video based communication tools within the application. Bailey and Bullington will use this webinar to showcase Discord's features that help productivity, cooperation, and learning.
Thomas Bullington is a Lecturer of Liberal Arts at Mercer University. He completed his doctoral work at the University of Mississippi. He researches a wide variety of fields: British literature of the long eighteenth century (1666-1800); intersections of botany and literature; literature and garden history; and video games and pedagogy.
Kristen Bailey is a Humanities Research Services Librarian at Mercer University. She received her MLIS from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Her research interests focus on experiential learning, information literacy, pop culture, and emerging technologies.
Bailey and Bullington published in a short piece on using Discord in the (suddenly) virtual classroom titled "The Emergency Campaign: Discord, D&D, and Distance Learning" in summer 2020.