Discord for Writers — Two Examples
Want to find a fairly easy / robust enough app to help you with your own writing projects, or within a writing-focused community in which you are a member, a leader, a facilitator? Discord may be that resource, particularly if you’re looking for something fairly intuitive, and not behind a lot of security barriers.
Thanks to Danielle Koepke for offering resources and a presentation on using Discord with a course, and for creating a server to facilitate the associated workshop experience; while I couldn’t attend the workshop, I appreciated the chance to see how one might set up a workshop space to help demonstrate the app’s usefulness in a writing classroom.
TimeStamps
0:00 intro Stories/Writers/Resources
9:08 Example overview — an individual project on discord — 100 videos
1:37 Example of 100 Video Server, categories, channels
4:00 Creating a new channel, and reordering it on the lineup
4:48 How a student might use a server space for their own projects
5:26 Overview of second example — a writing community facilitation
6:20 Overview of categories set up to encourage community participation
7:40 The private chat feature that falls in like text messaging
8:34 Summary — why I would use discord
8:41 Video #1 — setting up a server, setting roles, setting parameters
9:31 Video #2 — overviewing how to use Discord for participants
In this video, I overview two projects that will help you see how you might use the app. The first example is of an individual project or something you’re working on with one or two other poeple, and the second example is of a server I set up for a writing community I’ll soon be facilitating.
While Discord is great, it will require me to decide on where the group will be organizing their documents for editing/revisions, as Discord doesn’t have that range. In part, I often opt for Teams for this reasons. While I use Teams for a lot of projects, when I know I’ll be working with people outside my job space, I set up a more accessible option — i.e., one that doesn’t require me to seek special permission for someone outside the organization to join.
Teams as a group of resources, is fine, and an improvement over google drive, IMHO — at least for my ways of working, but it’s also not as intuitive as Discord, and the integration varies widely based on whether you’re using an ipad, phone, or computer, whether you’ve downloaded the app or program, whether you’ve chosen to work on a browser.
Some of that critique is true for Discord as well, but because it doesn’t include a document creation/collaborative editing space for essays/scripts, some of that disjointed experience from working on different devices doesn’t happen.
I never stop looking at new apps that might be useful for project management, and I think I can use a combination of Droplr (still exploring), Zotero, and Discord for a group of writers I plan to lead in the near future.
If you’re looking for an overview/examples of two directions for writing, and whether you might use Discord for your own project or to facilitate a group, this video offers two examples from my imagining.