Zoomtopia?

I live in Zoom. Zoom is where I participate in the majority of my meetings. Zoom is the place where synchronous online learning occurs at my institution. Zoom is where most of my professional development occurs. You?

Despite living in Zoomland, I will not be attending Zoomtopia.

Zoomtopia, the annual Zoom user conference, will take place (not on Zoom) on Oct. 15 and 16 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

While Snoop Dogg, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Richard Branson and Zachary Quinto will be in the house, I suspect that the number of higher ed attendees will be proportionately small. Why is this?

If it is true that Zoom has captured both the mind share and the market share of our postsecondary world -- as I suspect the platform has -- why is it that I’m hearing so little higher ed buzz about Zoomtopia?

To be fair, there are definitely some higher ed sessions and speakers slated for Zoomtopia. The question is if there is enough at Zoomtopia to entice higher ed people to attend. Travel budgets and time are limited, and I assume that Zoom will be well represented at higher ed specific events such as the Educause Annual Conference.

In fact, Educause is running in Chicago at the same time as Zoomtopia (Oct. 14-17), making the case to attend the latter even more challenging to make.

Still, I have to admit that I’m intrigued by Zoomtopia. Or maybe I’m fascinated by the idea of building an academic conference entirely around Zoom.

This idea goes against almost everything that I believe about how higher ed people should gather. The thought of building conversations around technology, as opposed to challenges and trends and scholarship, runs directly counter to where I think the ed-tech world needs to go.

Zoom has become a powerful enabling platform for both collaboration and synchronous education. I can’t help but wonder what would come out of going down the Zoom higher ed rabbit hole.

I can imagine a few good things coming out an EdZoom, Zoomademia, ZoomU gathering. (Which name do you like?)

First, I don’t know what I don’t know about Zoom feature requests. These blind spots may be a result of being too immersed in Zoom.

For instance, I do wonder about how many video feeds of participants that Zoom will let me see at any one time. How small will the Zoom video boxes get, and how many will go on a screen?

I’ve also been seeing some things about Zoom Rooms. What would a Zoom Classroom look like?

What about a ZoomOffice? Is there an intermediate place between a regular Zoom meeting and a full Zoom Room? Is there a way that I could set up my office environment, with multiple monitors and killer microphones, to optimize for Zoom meetings?

Scholarship. Data. Research. What are the possibilities with Zoom for higher ed?

How might Zoom work with schools to get agreements to anonymize the data to do cross-institutional research? How many questions might we be able to ask about the changing nature of higher ed if we had access to the underlying (anonymized) Zoom data?

A ZoomU convening (my favorite name) might be a place to talk about the future of synchronous online education. Where can we imagine Zoom going to create immersive, intimate and scalable synchronous learning environments?

Perhaps all these conversations will already occur at Educause. Or maybe they will happen at Zoomtopia. Don’t know.

What I do know is that Zoom matters for higher ed. How Zoom matters I’m not sure. Getting together to discuss would be interesting.

Can you argue for a different platform? Are there competitors to Zoom that colleges and universities should be given a first look or a second chance? What higher ed specific features would you like to see in Zoom? What would get you to attend Zoomtopia in 2020?