Online school means online classes which means sitting alone in your room writing essays and completing assignments. To combat this issue, a team of young adults have created Study Stream with virtual focus rooms allowing you to study with a global community of students over Zoom.
When you first enter the site you have the choice of servers you can enter, these are divided into pre university and university/ young professionals. Further division in these sections leads to 5 servers under each heading. As a university student I only checked out the servers under the university/ young professionals heading. I joined server 1, bearing in mind it was 12pm GMT, and there were 51 pages of people, around 800 students on one server! The servers following this had gradually less and less people.
As soon as I joined, I noticed that instead of everyone just having their names as the label to their screen, instagram handles were being used. I jumped right on this train and changed my name to my instagram username (but learn from my mistakes, don’t forget to change it back before your next professional meeting – I’m sure the CEO of my internship really appreciated me giving myself an instagram shoutout during our weekly team meeting).
What I cluelessly failed to realise is that putting my instagram bio next to my face meant that people were able to search and find my profile. This led me to discover a new series of pick up lines, for example one message was “is that a virtual background or are you just glowing?”. As flattering as this was, I started to feel like I was on an episode of Big Brother.
One thought that kept running through my mind during this experiment was ‘are people actually doing their work or are they just flicking through the pages watching other people work?’. While the first 10 minutes of this experiment I was both distracted and entertained by people’s creative backgrounds and potato face filters, once the novelty of this wore off I felt pressure to do my work just in case people were watching what I was doing so I needed to look busy. Through the time I was actually working, I had to make an active effort to keep my eyes on my work and not keep checking what I looked like in the camera.
Overall, I think Study Stream is a great initiative with positive motivations supporting it however, for it to work for me I would definitely have to use it a few times unproductively to get used to the idea. If it sounds like something that would help you try it out and let us know how you find it!