Share Paper: The Career You Save May Be Your Own: Exploring the mathtwitterblogosphere as a Community of Practice

  1. Bret Staudt Willet, Michigan State University, United States
  2. Paul Reimer, Michigan State University, United States
Friday, March 30 11:30-11:50 AM Edison E

Abstract: Teachers face numerous challenges: feeling isolated in their classrooms, overwhelmed by the demands of the job, and disappointed in traditional professional development. Prior research has pointed to Twitter as a possible solution to these challenges, so we examined teacher participation in the hashtag space #MTBoS (the mathtwitterblogosphere). We sought to answer: Do teachers’ contributions to #MTBoS demonstrate the characteristics of participation in a community of practice (CoP)? To answer, we collected 6,985 unique tweets tagged with #MTBoS. We qualitatively coded a sample of 100 original posts to analyze the quality of content as related to four characteristics of a community ...