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Zoom Doom
A short form smart note
Zoom doom is the depressed feeling of teaching to a gallery of blank screens. Though related to Zoom fatigue, Zoom doom compounds the fatigue that everyone feels with the instructor’s understanding that they must manage yet another meeting with Zoom-fatigued participants, often represented by “black screens of death.” Zoom doom is mostly an instructor phenomenon.
To alleviate Zoom doom, I propose that instructors focus Zoom classes on workshop activity, instead of distributing content. Every participant has their own Zoom “budget” that they can spend. Let’s not waste this valuable time on lectures, or even discussions, both of which can be done asynchronously. Have students work together in breakouts on a problem. Brainstorm ideas. Create texts or images. Peer review drafts. Do any thing that gets people interacting with more than one person and breaks us out of the Zoom death trance.
Often this will require bringing in a third space for your Zoom meeting. Everyone has their own personal space. Everyone shares the Zoom space. A third space can become the focus for interaction, whether that be a chat room, google doc, or digital whiteboard. With this third focus, we can stare at the work we are doing together, instead of Zombie faces and blank screens.
