<\/p>\n

Mark Olofson:<\/strong>\u00a0This is Mark Olofson with Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education and we\u2019ve got a couple of other researchers with us today. Guys could you just tell us your names and where you\u2019re at?<\/p>\n

Josh Rosenberg:\u00a0<\/strong>Yeah.<\/strong> Sure. I\u2019ll go first if you don\u2019t mind, Spencer. My name is Josh Rosenberg and I am a graduate student at Michigan State University and before graduate school I was a high school Biology and Earth Science and Chemistry teacher.<\/p>\n

Spencer Greenhalgh:<\/strong>\u00a0I\u2019m Spencer Greenhalgh. I am also at Michigan State University. Josh and I are both in MSU\u2019s Educational psychology and Educational Technology Program. I am in my fourth year there and where I do research on things like teacher’s use of Twitter. Josh and I do a couple of different kinds of Twitter research actually but one area that we\u2019ve really been interested in is what we call SETHs or State Educational Twitter Hashtags. We\u2019re particularly interested in this because as local as you can get with Twitter\u2026 we talk about Twitter being something that can connect people from all across the world and that\u2019s a wonderful ability that it has. But people are also using it in sort of geographically defined ways and we wanted to get a picture of what that looked like across the United States.<\/p>\n

Josh Rosenberg:<\/strong>\u00a0It\u2019s cool. It\u2019s ambitious. It\u2019s inspiring. We don\u2019t know a lot more about what to really make of this new opportunity, whether it\u2019s for us as teachers to share resources we create or resources we find. Whether it\u2019s a chance for us to connect with others. We came to this research largely through participating in the same communities, or the same hashtags in this case, and through participating in them we saw an opportunity to possibly collect data on what was going on and just start to create a portrait of what was going on, kind of as a first step and building on some kind of newer work on Twitter and education.<\/p>\n

Mark Olofson:<\/strong>\u00a0What types of things do you see educators doing on Twitter?<\/p>\n

Josh Rosenberg:<\/strong>\u00a0We see them tweeting a lot. Over six months we looked at lists of hashtags that other folks had created and we did our best to find a hashtag for every state and we found more than half a million tweets over six months. This is the first six months of 2015 and we have some more recent data including Vermont hashtag #vted, for this most recent year. But they\u2019re talking about a lot of different things.<\/p>\n

Spencer Greenhalgh:\u00a0<\/strong>Teachers are using Twitter to build community and we expected this to be a sort of very professionally-driven thing and don\u2019t get us wrong, it is but at the same time, we also saw teachers who are just shouting the breeze. They\u2019re connecting with people that they haven\u2019t seen in a while. Or maybe people that they only know through Twitter. They\u2019re chatting and they\u2019re having a good time. Anything from building community to also contributing to a broader educational conversation, they\u2019re offering their own thoughts form their own experience. They\u2019re developing original ideas and sharing it with others. On top of that, they\u2019re also taking the original ideas that others have shared and others have created and they\u2019re engaging with that in a way. They\u2019re endorsing it or critiquing it, or commenting in on it in some way. There\u2019s a wide range of purposes that teachers same to have when they use Twitter. We\u2019ve been really impressed with the diversity of ways that teachers are using Twitter and also as Josh mentioned the scope. There\u2019s a lot of tweeting going on across the whole United States.<\/p>\n

Mark Olofson:<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong>Here in Vermont we have a Twitter chat that we \u2026different folks host and we\u2019re really kind of focusing on Thursday nights and we bring a set of questions to it and encourage teachers to chime in on sort of a structured chat. Is that something that you see happening in other places?<\/p>\n

Spencer Greenhalgh:<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong>One of the most promising things we\u2019re starting to notice and it\u2019s\u2026 I say notice because obviously we have nothing to do with the chats that are already established and are ongoing. One big difference we see Mark, is that when states seem to have a synchronous chat, whether it\u2019s every other week, every week, or less common than those, there seems to be a lot more activity. That\u2019s not surprising because just by the nature of having an hour where people come together at the same time to discuss communicating with parents or curricular standards or in some states political topics. A lot of the SETHs that we\u2019re seeing\u2026 Kansas sticks out, are very politically active.<\/p>\n

In addition to the amount of activity, there seems to be a lot more mentions. A trend that we\u2019re not really sure about yet but maybe just intuitively you might expect is, 6 days and 23 hours when there\u2019s not a chat, people are more likely to be sharing out content, sharing out links, sometimes with many hashtags. When they\u2019re talking at the same time for a chat, there seems to be a lot more interaction. A lot more mentions between participants. That seems pretty interesting because it shows maybe that\u2026 we use Twitter in different ways depending on when we choose to use a hashtag or just participate in another way.<\/p>\n

Mark Olofson:<\/strong>\u00a0Yeah. You know I would say that you know – addressing a little bit about what comes up in those – Vermont is working with some policy mandates around personalized learning and I think that the Twitter chat has been a great place for people to unpack what\u2019s going on in their schools around some of those personalized learning plans and other things related to what here is called Act 77, and so it\u2019s been really nice when there\u2019s been a statewide change to have that statewide outlet for teachers and administrators to all kind of connect and talk about what\u2019s going on in their spaces.<\/p>\n

Spencer Greenhalgh:<\/strong>\u00a0If I can build on that a little bit I think it\u2019s one of the reason that Josh and I and our colleagues were interested in looking at this particular state-based phenomenon of Twitter use. As I said, there are a lot of different ways out there. I\u2019m familiar with SS chat for social studies teachers across the country. There are a lot of different ways to participate. We were trying to think why did these sort of geographically centered hashtags also exist and I think it\u2019s exactly, Mark, for the reasons that you\u2019re talking about that in the United Sates as much as we might talk about or even complain about the role of the federal government in education, much of what\u2019s going on is happening at a state level and it\u2019s really important for the teachers in Vermont to be able to band together and – teachers in California might not be able to relate to them on those points. If they\u2019re talking about subject matter, that\u2019s a different thing but when it comes to issues of policy and what\u2019s going on in the classroom, often the voices that teachers need to hear, or so we feel from our research, and what appears to be evident in the existence of these state-based hashtags, the voices that people need to hear are the ones that are a couple counties over or on the other side of the state; someone who can sort of relate to what\u2019s going on in your classroom.<\/p>\n

Josh Rosenberg:<\/strong>\u00a0Because Vermont, by some measures, is the most active SETH. One thing we looked at was how many people used a start hashtag over six months. In Vermont that was a little over 2000 unique participants. We adjusted the number of participants by how many teachers there were in the state using kind of the best data that we could get on the number of teachers per state from some census data. Vermont came out on top with\u2026 A caveat is of course not everyone who participates is a teacher but we used that kind of as a proxy for the size of the educational community in the state and there were about .25, actually closer to .26 people who used the #vted as there were teachers in the state, a really high proportion of activity in Vermont.<\/p>\n

Mark Olofson:<\/strong>\u00a0We could translate that to be neighborhood of one in four if we\u2019re adjusted by that teacher metric. If everybody was participating in it it\u2019d be – .25 is that a decent interpretation?<\/p>\n

Josh Rosenberg:<\/strong>\u00a0Yeah, thanks. That\u2019s\u2019 exactly it. One thing – we pulled out a sample of participants and we tried to code how many were administrators, how many were in instructional support positions how many were educational researchers, how many were representing an organization and we found out that about .25 of all of our participants were teachers. I guess it\u2019d be like, if you wanted to make a claim from the data you could say maybe 1 in 16 Vermont teachers, roughly.<\/p>\n

Spencer Greenhalgh:<\/strong>\u00a0Josh brings up a great point there because it\u2019s also administrators, it\u2019s also, you know, university researchers and other folks who have a connection to education who are getting involved in these conversations\u2026 we don\u2019t have any data to prove this one way or the other but I imagine sometimes that\u2019s really helpful and sometimes it might muddy up the conversation a little bit but it\u2019s interesting to note that because Twitter is a public forum other people are getting involved in these educational discussions.<\/p>\n

Mark Olofson:<\/strong>\u00a0Absolutely. We here at the Tarrant Institute are at the University of Vermont and work in schools and we definitely do utilize the #vted hashtag in order to continue to participate in the conversation.<\/p>\n

Spencer Greenhalgh:<\/strong>\u00a0Yeah, exactly.<\/p>\n

Mark Olofson:<\/strong>\u00a0You alluded to that a lot of folks in Vermont are using this hashtag and I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about how frequently folks who do use the hashtag, how often are they on Twitter? How active are they on this hashtag?<\/p>\n

Josh Rosenberg:<\/strong>\u00a0That\u2019s a great question and maybe something we can look at and dive into deeper. Right now it looks like there\u2019s kind of a long tail where there\u2019s a lot of people who are really active and then a lot of people who participate just once or twice. We haven\u2019t done really enough to look into that but there seems to be a wide range of degree of how active the average Twitter user for #vted and other hashtags is.<\/p>\n

Spencer Greenhalgh:<\/strong>\u00a0I think one thing we can say across the US is that there\u2019s an average of about 70 of these tweets coming out per day, which if you think of these in terms of professional development, sort of reflects a steady stream of contact with the broader teaching community. Again, that\u2019s an average taken across the entire United States not just Vermont Ed, but it\u2019s a number that we\u2019ve been impressed with. Like Josh said, what we have some – definitively some area to dig deeper and figure out what\u2019s going on in these particular SETHs.<\/p>\n

Mark Olofson:<\/strong>\u00a0I think you guys also looked at when people were doing these tweets, sort of like what days of the week. Is this something that people are holding off until the weekend or is it pretty consistent throughout the week?<\/p>\n

Josh Rosenberg:<\/strong>\u00a0Yeah. It seems to be that, kind of surprisingly or maybe not, Friday and Saturday seem to be the lowest activity days. I guess what\u2019s super impressive is that so many of us are coming home and tweeting at 8 o\u2019clock on a week night. But on Friday night, we seem to take the sets off. And Saturday too. By the same token, Sunday is\u2026 it\u2019s almost the most active day. It looks like Sunday and Thursday were two days with really high activity. Maybe it\u2019s preparing for the week ahead, lesson planning –<\/p>\n

Mark Olofson: <\/strong>I was going to say, that seems – at least when I think about when I was teaching, those were times that I was doing a lot of my preparation work. Thinking about if folks are doing lesson planning or planning projects, these types of things, that maybe Twitter and these hashtags are spaces that they\u2019re turning to help assist them in their planning.<\/p>\n

Spencer Greenhalgh:<\/strong>\u00a0I think it also connects to what we talked about earlier in terms of chats. If you break down these overall figures by chat, you can see for example that the Georgia ed hashtag is really active on Thursdays and barely active the other days of the week. Michigan ed, #miched, is pretty active throughout the week but there\u2019s a clear peak on Wednesdays. From what we know of these hashtags, it\u2019s because there\u2019s a chat going on, on one of these particular nights and – I don\u2019t know. That\u2019s really impressive to see that this chat is drawing in so many people enough that it\u2019s really affecting the participation and\u2026 it goes back to this idea that these chats in particular, not just the hashtag but also these chats are really valuable resources for the teachers involved.<\/p>\n

Mark Olofson:<\/strong>\u00a0You guys have now spent a lot of time looking at what educators are doing on Twitter. You\u2019ve alluded to some continued research that you\u2019re going on. Overall, what do you think educators are really getting out of using Twitter? That maybe they couldn\u2019t get from somewhere else?<\/p>\n

Josh Rosenberg:<\/strong>\u00a0That\u2019s a great question. Do you have any ideas Spencer?<\/p>\n