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Educators on the Front Page of the Internet: Education-Related Subreddits as Learning Spaces
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, Michigan State University, United States ; , Elon University, United States

AACE Award

Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference, in Las Vegas, NV, United States ISBN 978-1-939797-37-7 Publisher: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), Waynesville, NC USA

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Abstract

Accessing and contributing to online spaces have become regular parts of many educators’ professional activities. However, the popular discussion forum website Reddit has received little attention from educational researchers despite the presence of multiple education-related subreddits that have tens of thousands of subscribers and feature thousands of threaded conversations per year. To address this gap in the literature, we gathered data related to one year of activity on four education-related subreddits. Comparative analysis revealed substantial differences among the four subreddits in terms of levels of engagement, sentiment, and network characteristics. Reddit appears to host multiple online spaces that are diverse in nature and might meet or respond to different educator needs. We discuss these findings in relation to the extant literature and consider implications for future research and teacher education practice.

Citation

Staudt Willet, K.B. & Carpenter, J. (2019). Educators on the Front Page of the Internet: Education-Related Subreddits as Learning Spaces. In K. Graziano (Ed.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 2787-2795). Las Vegas, NV, United States: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved December 10, 2023 from .

© 2019 Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE)

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