Community through Discord (and other platforms): How undergraduate students’ digital engagements remake campus ecological networks
(Michael Brown & Rachel Smith)
In community colleges, where students commute and balance multiple commitments, the learning environment extends to varied online spheres in ways that afford and constrain opportunity on campus. Drawing on aspects of network ecology, especially modality in terms of place and time, we present a study of students’ classroom based connections and how the modality of their communication influenced relationship formation, norm generation, and maintenance. We found that students’ peer network hybridity–including the physical campus alongside their interactions in non-institutional bounded social media places such as Discord–meaningfully shaped their learning, support, and transfer networks. We then consider the implications of students’ network hybridity for observing student community and shaping “campus” learning environments.