Share Paper: Educators on the Front Page of the Internet: Education-Related Subreddits as Learning Spaces

  1. K. Bret Staudt Willet, Michigan State University, United States
  2. Jeffrey Carpenter, Elon University, United States
Friday, March 22 10:45 AM-11:15 AM Wilshire A

Abstract: Accessing and contributing to online spaces have become regular parts of many educators’ professional activities. However, the popular discussion forum website Reddit has received little attention from educational researchers despite the presence of multiple education-related subreddits that have tens of thousands of subscribers and feature thousands of threaded conversations per year. To address this gap in the literature, we gathered data related to one year of activity on four education-related subreddits. Comparative analysis revealed substantial differences among the four subreddits in terms of levels of engagement, sentiment, and network characteristics. Reddit appears to host multiple online spaces that are diverse ...