Associate Professor Jeffrey Carpenter, director of the Teaching Fellows program, and his co-authors published the article in Computers & Education Open.
Associate Professor Jeffrey Carpenter, director of the Teaching Fellows program at Elon University, joined with colleagues from three other universities to co-author an article in the peer-reviewed journal Computers & Education Open.
Carpenter worked with Torrey Trust (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Royce Kimmons (Brigham Young University) and Dan Krutka (University of North Texas) on “Sharing and self-promoting: An analysis of educator tweeting at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic”.
The article abstract:
Researchers have documented an array of ways Twitter hashtags offer digital spaces where educators can connect around interests and needs. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, educators tweeted using various pandemic-related Twitter hashtags. In this study, we analyze data from two such hashtags: #remoteteaching and #remotelearning. We first data mined more than 36,000 tweets and then analyzed a random sample of 1,148 tweets and the accounts which sent those tweets. Our results suggest that the hashtags functioned as spaces in which a variety of education stakeholders engaged in activities that included knowledge sharing, social sharing, and information broadcasting. Alongside and sometimes entangled with such sharing, there was also a great deal of self-promotion. We discuss how these spaces appeared to offer potential benefits to educators navigating the transition to remote teaching but also consider how the presence of self-promotion may suggest downsides to such social mediums. We conclude with implications of these findings for education stakeholders and future research.
The article reference:
Carpenter, J. P., Trust, T., Kimmons, R., & Krutka, D. G. (2021). Sharing and self-promoting: An analysis of educator tweeting at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Computers & Education Open, 2, 100038.