Tracing the Development of www.internationalednews.com

• In Event: 53.066 - The Past, Present, and Future of Educational Change

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the evolution of International Ed News (IEN), a blog and Twitter feed designed to share information, news, and research on educational change around the world. Launched in 2011, IEN takes advantage of the benefits that social media create for scholarship and scholarly exchange, including:
-Access to diverse sources of information and ideas that cross geographic, social, and cultural boundaries;
-Opportunities to engage with people outside our personal and professional spheres;
-Real-time communication that makes it possible to share information and ideas and make connections without reliance on traditional outlets for scholarly publication.
Ironically, these advantages of access, opportunity and speed simultaneously create challenges that can undermine the power and integrity of scholarship. Despite increased access and opportunities, it still takes work to break out of our own personal and professional spheres and find relevant information. Furthermore, social media also facilitates the proliferation of dominant discourses that can overwhelm rather than foster diverse viewpoints. These problems are complicated by a mode of communication that demands immediacy and can contribute to the spread of false information, innuendo and lies, yet can also promote the exchange of grounded research and thoughtful reporting.

Perspective and Method

This paper reports on IEN’s efforts to respond to these possibilities and challenges and build an audience. To do so the paper addresses four questions:
-How has IEN’s presentation and strategy changed over the past five years?
-How has IEN’s audience evolved over the same period of time?
-What posts, topics and geographic areas have been most popular?
-What’s the relationship between the changes in IEN’s presentation and strategy and the growth of IEN’s audience?
To answer these questions, this paper reviews and compares the growth of IEN’s audience for both weekly WordPress blog posts and the daily Twitter feed. Data from WordPress include statistics on number of page views as well as visits by unique visitors. Twitter data also includes which links are “clicked” most often.

Results

Drawing on the data, the paper describes IEN’s evolution from an “aggregator” of news and research on educational change to a website providing weekly blog posts and daily news updates. Data show that views of the blog posts have increased by almost 150% a year. In 2015, the website had an average of 2,500 views a month. While 33% of viewers come from the U.S., 67% come from other countries (Singapore and the Philippines have the second and third most visitors with 8% and 7% respectively). Currently, around 35 viewers click on the links in the most popular daily tweets.

Scholarly Significance

The evolution of IEN shows that promoting interaction in a variety of online spaces has become part of the publication process, which requires a publishing shift towards a participatory network that contributes, responds, and shares content. The paper concludes with the implications for the development of a new genre of scholarship that builds on the best traditions of both educational research and reporting.

Authors

• Thomas C. Hatch, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Deirdre Faughey, Teachers College, Columbia University