Slack

Reviewed by Maria Widmer
Details: Slack Technologies, Inc., June 8, 2016, iOS 8.0 or later
Cost: Free / Upgradeable plan options
Review: Slack has quickly become the de facto standard for team communications in forward-looking companies around the world. Slack blends the best of instant messaging and emailing to support synchronous and asynchronous discussion, file sharing, one-to-one and group conversations, and information archival and search functionalities.
Slack has great potential to support informal learning in the workplace by offering a venue through which team members can share and store information through project-specific and more general “water cooler” chats. In formal learning contexts, Slack is an effective platform with which learners can plan, coordinate, and discuss collaborative learning projects.
The social affordances of the Slack app strongly support the development of learners’ Communication and Collaboration skills, competencies consistently identified as keys to success in the 21st century workplace. As the app relies heavily on text-based discussion (though it does support visual elements like emoticons and GIFs), users need to practice clear written communication, collectively negotiate shared meanings, and effectively and respectfully resolve disagreements in the virtual collaboration space. By storing the discourse and associated files in a searchable archive, learners have some assurance that their “cognitive imprints” and social networks can persist beyond the artificial time-constraints of the academic semester.
