Can You Hear Me Now? Teachers' Versus Researchers' Measures of the Twitter #Edchat Affinity Space

• In Event: Educators' Engagement in Networked Learning

Abstract

Researchers are increasingly using the affinity spaces framework to conceptualize online communities of teachers. However, because of Twitter’s affordances, teachers and researchers may understand hashtag affinity spaces in different ways. This study focuses on how participants talk to each other in Twitter #Edchat. The affinity space is defined as the reply network of 13,206 replies from 3,680 tweeters. The tweet corpus includes not just replies with the #Edchat hashtag—as in previous studies—but also reply threads where #Edchat was included in a later tweet. Results showed that more than one-in-five replies did not contain the hashtag, as well as numerous differences between replies with and without #Edchat. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for researchers and teachers.

Author

• Bret Staudt Willet, Florida State University