The Career You Save May Be Your Own: Exploring the mathtwitterblogosphere as a Community of Practice
PROCEEDING
Bret Staudt Willet, Paul Reimer, Michigan State University, United States
Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference, in Washington, D.C., United States ISBN 978-1-939797-32-2 Publisher: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), Waynesville, NC USA
Abstract
Teachers face numerous challenges: feeling isolated in their classrooms, overwhelmed by the demands of the job, and disappointed in traditional professional development. Prior research has pointed to Twitter as a possible solution to these challenges, so we examined teacher participation in the hashtag space #MTBoS (the mathtwitterblogosphere). We sought to answer: Do teachers’ contributions to #MTBoS demonstrate the characteristics of participation in a community of practice (CoP)? To answer, we collected 6,985 unique tweets tagged with #MTBoS. We qualitatively coded a sample of 100 original posts to analyze the quality of content as related to four characteristics of a community of practice (CoP): (a) domain of knowledge, (b) community of people, (c) shared practice, and (d) discipline of convening. In this initial exploration, we found that there is evidence of #MTBoS functioning as a CoP and further research is warranted.
Citation
Staudt Willet, B. & Reimer, P. (2018). The Career You Save May Be Your Own: Exploring the mathtwitterblogosphere as a Community of Practice. In E. Langran & J. Borup (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 2324-2329). Washington, D.C., United States: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved March 19, 2024 from https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/182845/.
© 2018 Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE)
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