Clubhouse
Peter Thomas (then writing as founding director of HaileyburyX) and Annabel Astbury, Head of Education at the ABC, on the newest social media app, Clubhouse.
The first rule of Clubhouse is you don’t talk about Clubhouse.
Well, not quite, as lots of people are talking about Clubhouse, the newest kid on the social media block.
If you haven’t heard about it, and you could be forgiven for that as it is still invitation-only — Clubhouse is an audio-only social app. It lets you do the equivalent of walking down a hallway, and when you hear an interesting conversation happening in a room you stick your head around the door, and if it sounds fun, you can squeeze in down the back (excuse me, excuse me, sorry), take a seat, swig your water and listen in. And later, if the speakers like the look of you, they can invite you to take the stage too.
Of course, it’s all on your phone — so the hallway is a feed, and the rooms are a list of folks chatting — but Clubhouse kind of has that hallway/room feeling, which is exactly what it intends: a community where you can engage with people who you may or may not know without the whole Zoom invite palaver (and in any case, no need to put your Zoomface on).
And while Rule #1 of Fight Club doesn’t quite apply, maybe the AA Yellow Card instruction “What you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here” is closer — as Clubhouse rooms don’t save conversations or record audio.
So what? You might be thinking. I did this whole chatroom thing in 1995 and meh.
But Clubhouse seems to have tapped into a rich seam of demand. Maybe it’s videoconferencing fatigue or the opportunity to rub audio shoulders with celebs (Oprah, Kevin Hart, Drake, Chris Rock, or Ashton Kutcher all host chats). Maybe it’s that our ears are now open, due to the popularity of podcasts and audiobooks, or the fact that we are thoroughly sick of email and Teams. Perhaps it’s that while Insta looks good, you have to have your gameface on to make a good Reel and we are over that now. Or maybe it’s that beyond Snapchat streaks, it’s an opportunity to do adult-style networking without the finger food and badge staring.
It started with elite Silicon Valley VCs, but now Clubhouse hosts a variety of celebrity talk shows, D.J. nights, networking events, speed dating, theatrical performances and political discussions, according to the NY Times and now, by attracting a broader range of influencers, has much bigger potential influence. As a Clubhouse spokesperson said in the NYTimes article:
“We believe voice is a powerful medium for people to connect, share, learn and grow through authentic conversation. On Clubhouse anyone can be a creator by starting a room and hosting conversations.”
But haven’t we heard this empower-the-creators stuff before — whether it’s Clubhouse, or TikTok, the other creator-centric social media app to hit the wires?
We’re educators, so our first question is usually “so how can this be used in education?” So rather than extol the virtues of The Next Big Thing (which Clubhouse might just be, or it might be The Next Big Meh, like Vine, which failing to catch fire with the influencers and the influenced, shut down after much initial change-the-world hype) we’d like to talk about what potential uses it might have in education.
As we have said in other stories in this series, we’re not advocating or recommending, just trying to mine out some interesting use cases for new technologies, platforms and services in education. And not just for students, but for the broader education ecosystem which increasingly, inevitably and forever (we would argue) is about technology.
So what are some interesting use cases? Perhaps the ones closest to our interests are those that are about how learning and teaching happens— before the pandemic happened, face to face, and during it, online.
We’ve talked a lot in the past about the transformational possibilities of digital learning. But putting aside the question of whether it has fulfilled its promise, can Clubhouse be useful in learning and teaching. And how?
Simplistically, teachers could just spin up a room, students invite each other (the age restriction is currently 17+, though), and off you go with a place to discuss and explore and debate. You can see this working for a discussion of novelistic non-fiction in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, but perhaps less for so for a subject like factorising algebraic expressions.
But you never know.
Used cleverly, Clubhouse could provide a rich complement to almost any subject, especially those where insights come from deeper peer interaction.
One issue is whether audio provides the stickiness needed to grab students’ attention; another is how could Clubhouse fit within a pedagogical strategy? The first one could only find out by doing it; but the second — as has been argued by many educators — is about the distinction between ‘technology-rich instruction’ and ‘digital learning’; one is shoehorning in some new tech to spray out content, the other is about redesigning learning experiences in a principled, well-designed, student-centric and outcome-focused way.
And while Cubhouse is currently restricted to 17+ users, this may change — or another developer will create a student- and learner-centric audio-only Clubhouse-like app with much tighter privacy controls and features targeted at a 13+ age group (or lower).
There are of course lots of audio apps for children — such as the excellent StoryCorps, Spoon or, from Twitter, Audio Spaces — and of course Discord, now promoted as ‘your place to talk’, with a huge user base of 100 million MAU and 4 billion minutes in conversation daily. Discord says that there’s “no endless scrolling, no news feed, and no tracking likes. No algorithms decide what you ‘should’ see”. This is very much the same as Clubhouse but focused on gamers.
If the future belongs to the creators, one might imagine that developing a serious skill set around digital moderation would be an advantage for learners. With sufficiently strong guardrails, older students would acquire valuable skills that they can apply in many contexts as they emerge into a digitalised workplace full of Slack and Teams and a hundred other collaboration and conversation apps. The future digitalised workplace may be flattened and democratized, but there will always be a need to manage communities effectively to get the best out of these tools.
Is a ‘Clubhouse for education’ nothing more than impromptu show and tell in a classroom, a Discord chat, a breakout room in Zoom or debate club? Maybe, but perhaps the audio-only nature of Clubhouse interactions requires greater sensitivity to both the details of the setup — what is and isn’t allowed — a certain nimbleness to the interactions controlled by moderators, and a greater awareness of the nuances of participation by those not speaking as well as those who are.
And when you don’t have a Zoom recording, a transcript or captions, the need to be really present — attending, comprehending, really listening — is far greater. Can audio-only interactions hone students' skills to mine out the highly relevant content that would help them learn more effectively?
Inevitably, teachers are already on Clubhouse. The Teacher’s Lounge club has 3.7k members; and the (overly self-promotingly named, perhaps) Identity Shapers of Education club has 203 members. Where there are those with a shared mission, so forums will spring up for people to share their views. So maybe it won’t be long before there will be a lot more, and a lot more busy, educator forums on Clubhouse.
But as with many professional conversations that emerge on social media, there are lurkers: those who are there to see the show rather than have a hand in making the show. Clubhouse doesn’t feel like Twitter, where you can follow your fave hashtagged edu event and get some useful insights from those in the discussion. The audio in Clubhouse is not at all like a text-based discussion where the expression of ideas can often be hampered by clumsy expression, character limits, long and complex threads and a timeline that scrolls past so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. Audio demands more attention and effort — because speakers feel more empowered to express themselves in a much more natural way — but it may be that a counter-effect is that one lurks longer and harder as there is more to take in.
Of course, with any social media platform, success will come down to the quality of content. For education professionals, the conversation needs to be practical and useful. Clubhouse is in its early days, and it remains to be seen what ‘quality’ looks like on this platform. Still, there certainly seems to be an opportunity to democratise discussions around education — at least until the same old voices grab all the eartime. Hopefully, though, the soapboxers, extollers and pontificators will be in the minority, and maybe this will only play out when Clubhouse emerges from its invite-only state into a mass market.
Informal professional learning through reading, participating in online discussions or having a hallway chat with a colleague has been around for ages — and arguably those conversations are some of the most productive, which may be a reason why Clubhouse might succeed where other platforms have become noisy and so less impactful. Dropping in and out of a Clubhouse conversation is perhaps what would drive educators (and many professionals) to participate — it brings a sense of authentic, unproduced, unscripted listen-inness that in some senses is almost like tuning into talk radio while driving.
Perhaps another big win here will be for schools talking to their wider community of parents, families and other members of the community who may relish insights into topics like teaching through the pandemic, strategies for employability, or any of a hundred other subjects that are traditionally covered in uninteractive newsletters and emails. Without the need for cameras, logins, signups to mailing lists and the usual paraphernalia of communications, maybe audio-only interactive forums like Clubhouse can serve to bring a level of authenticity to school-community communications that other technologies may struggle to provide. After all, who wants to turn their camera on for the school assembly?
Like any new platform making waves in the digital ether, Clubhouse will evolve and face the same evolutionary growth pains as any other new platform. There is the challenge of monetization: everything costs money to run and investors will be looking for a return. What will happen once Clubhouse leaves its invitation-only state and becomes public? Will marketers flood the rooms? Will brands create campaigns? Will authenticity be sacrificed to commerce?
Perhaps it comes down to smart, forward-thinking design. Design that avoids the echo chamber nature of many closed communities which, as we have seen in the recent post-Twitter Trumpian Parler debacle, can be a hotbed of fake news and one-dimensional conversations (and worse).
And, in an education context (and especially in the context of younger participants) — there are going to have be some smart ways to deal with the inevitable problem of bad actors, harassers, abusers and the generally malicious trolls that have been around since the first email scooted its way across the internet. What Clubhouse will do about this — beyond a set of guidelines and community moderation — remains to be seen.
Clubhouse, we feel, is better seen as part of an engagement experience strategy — whether for learning and teaching, sharing insights between professionals, community engagement or just hanging out and talking about the latest trending Netflix show.
It’s not the only thing — and, given the ferocious speed of digital evolution, it may not even be a thing in a year — and is better seen in the context of the many apps, tools, channels and platforms available to educators.
A few years ago, in examining the differences between radio and TV, intimacy was seen as a distinguishing factor — with radio being more intimate, as discussed in this BBC story that said “what distinguishes a podcast from radio is that it’s intimacy plus, because you’ve chosen it and it’s literally in your ears.”
Podcasts are, of course, passive listening experiences. So is Clubhouse intimacy plus plus? By encouraging participation — notwithstanding the possibility of lurkers — Clubhouse may help educators, and hopefully, learners, find their voice and revive something which we always say is increasingly lost: the art of conversation.
