Abstract

The global COVID-19 pandemic produced economic and social disruptions of unprecedented scale. In Spring 2020, schooling at all levels was halted or forced to switch to emergency remote teaching. Social media platforms, including Twitter, have been an avenue for educators to access professional learning from peers as part of broader professional learning networks (PLNs). This paper extends previous research by examining the educational response to COVID-19 within and across two countries, the United Kingdom and the United States, as documented in the Twitter #Edchat hashtag between February 1–May 31, 2020. Findings reveal topics of conversation by U.K. and U.S. tweeters were quite similar, but also highlight distinct discourse themes (e.g., #homelearning versus #remotelearning). These differences are discussed and connected to recent educational trends and emphases in the U.K. and U.S.

Citation

Staudt Willet, K.B., Greenhow, C. & Lewin, C. (2021). Tweeting Across the Pond: COVID-19 Emergency Learning Networks in the United Kingdom and the United States through Twitter #Edchat. In E. Langran & L. Archambault (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 1769-1778). Online, United States: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved January 27, 2023 from https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/219343/.

© 2021 Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE)