Scholarship on the intersection of Mormonism and the internet has often focused on progressive online voices. However, in recent years, the DezNat movement has challenged the assumption that online Mormonism necessarily trends more liberal than the Latter-day Saint mainstream. In this study, we examine the influence of red pill communities—which include far-right and anti-feminist movements on the internet—on DezNat. We collected 1,378 screenshots of tweets containing the #DezNat hashtag (which often included additional data and context) and engaged in open coding of these tweets, guided by our understanding of red pill concepts and tropes. We found considerable evidence of far-right and anti-feminist influences on DezNat-tagged tweets, suggesting that it is disingenuous for DezNat defenders to describe the movement as merely about Latter-day Saint orthodoxy. However, interpreting our findings through an affinity space framework, we argue that it is impractical—and perhaps impossible—to definitively establish the motivations of all those who participate in the movement. Rather, we suggest that the clear red pill references by DezNat participants provide an opportunity to consider overlaps between Mormonism, the far right, and aggressive anti-feminism—as well as the tensions between intentional ambiguity and boundary maintenance in Latter-day Saint institutions.

Academics’ use of social media platforms is widely recognized and often understood as an extension of traditional academic practice. However, this understanding does not account for academics’ use of pseudonymous Twitter accounts. We used a combination of computational and human-driven methods to examine the activity of 59 anonymized, self-identified academics on Twitter. Our computational analysis identified five broad topics: discussing academic life, discussing British news and affairs, discussing everyday life, surviving lockdown, and engaging with academic Twitter. Within these broad topics, we identified 24 more specific codes, most of which were concentrated in individual topics, with some cross-cutting codes. These codes demonstrate how the pseudonymous accounts considered in this study can be considered ‘authentically academic’ even if they do not conform with widespread expectations of academic social media use.

Despite the continued use of social media in educational contexts, there remains skepticism about whether platforms like Twitter can actually contribute to learning. In this paper, we argue that such skepticism is based on an overly narrow conception of learning that focuses on academic performance and disregards other manifestations. To advance this argument, we document use of the #bac2018 Twitter hashtag in the month leading up to the 2018 baccalauréat exams (the “bac”), which are significant not only for their role in the French educational system but also for their connections with broader French society and culture. We found that participants engaged in sharing notes; slacking, doubting, and fearing; requesting retweets; preferring topics; complaining; connecting with bac heritage and experience; joking; and showing awareness of time. In keeping with the significance of the bac, we found that these practices within the #bac2018 hashtag were associated with not only academic learning but also social and cultural practices that are significant despite their absence from any formal curriculum. These findings underline the complexity and richness that characterizes learning—especially in digital contexts.

Research on teachers’ use of social media has typically assumed that it is a) driven by a need for professional learning and b) best understood in terms of individual motivations. In this study, we use a dataset of nearly 600,000 tweets posted to one or more of 48 Regional Educational Twitter Hashtags associated with 44 U.S. states. To explore the influence of local contextual factors on hashtag- and account-level activity in these hashtags, we use an analytic approach heretofore uncommon in social media-focussed education research: generalised linear and multilevel modelling. At the hashtag level, higher numbers of teachers within a state, proportions of students receiving subsidised meals, student-to-teacher ratios, and amounts of state spending per child are associated with more activity within a regional hashtag; by contrast, more left-leaning state governments and citizenries are associated with less activity. At the account level, more experienced accounts and accounts in more right-leaning states contribute more tweets to these hashtags. These findings reinforce established understandings of Twitter as a site for teacher learning; however, they also underline the importance of acknowledging other important purposes of teachers’ Twitter use, including receiving emotional support and engaging in activism.

The existing work on teacher-focused Twitter hashtags typically frames each hashtag as a single, unified phenomenon, thereby collapsing or erasing differences between them (and any resulting implications for learning). In this study, we conceived of teacher-focused hashtags as affinity spaces potentially containing subspaces distinguished by synchronous chats and other, asynchronous communication. We used computational methods to explore how participation differed in terms of content, interactions, and portals between these contexts within the #michED hashtag used by Michigan teachers. During the 2015–2016 academic year, #michED saw more non-chat activity than chat activity, and most participants only engaged in one mode of activity or the other. Participation during chats was associated with more replying as well as more socially-, affectively-, and cognitively-related content, suggesting a focus on social interaction. In contrast, non-chat participation was associated with more retweeting, mentioning, hyperlinks, and hashtags, suggesting a focus on content dissemination. These results suggest that different affinity spaces—and different literacy practices—may exist within the same hashtag to support different objectives. Teachers, teacher educators, and researchers should therefore be careful to make these distinctions when considering Twitter as a learning technology for teachers.

In this paper, we document different expressions of Mormon identity and different approaches to Mormon practice within the #ldsconf Twitter hashtag. In particular, we examine #ldsconf during two important events in the recent history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: the presidential transition from Thomas Monson to Russell Nelson in January 2018, and the Church’s formal acceptance of Nelson as Church president in April 2018. Our findings suggest that the #ldsconf hashtag allows for more expression of identity than formal Latter-day Saint contexts and that Twitter hashtags afford a ready audience for religious discussion in which no bounds are set on appropriate identity or practice.

Twitter and other social media have assumed important places in many educators’ professional lives by hosting spaces where new kinds of collegial interactions can occur. However, such spaces can also attract unwelcome Twitter traffic that complicates researchers’ attempts to explore and understand educators’ professional social media experiences. In this article, we define various kinds of spam that we have identified in our research on educators’ uses of Twitter. After providing an overview of the concept of spam, we evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to addressing the presence of spam in educator-focused Twitter spaces. Then we suggest practical, holistic metrics that can be employed to help identify spam. Through secondary analyses of our past research, we describe the use of such metrics to identify and deal with spam in three specific cases. Finally, we discuss implications of spam and these suggested methods for teacher educators, instructional designers and educational technology researchers.

Although researchers have discovered a great deal about who uses Twitter for educational purposes, what they post about, when they post and why they participate, there has so far been little work to explore where participants in educational Twitter contexts are located. In this paper, we establish a methodological foundation that can support the exploration of geographical issues in educational Twitter research. We surveyed 46 participants in one educational Twitter hashtag, #michED, to determine where they lived; we then compared these responses to results from three digital methods for geolocating Twitter users (human coding, machine coding and GPS coding) to explore these methods’ affordances and constraints. Human coding of Twitter profiles allowed us to analyze more participants with higher levels of accuracy but also has disadvantages compared to other digital—and traditional—methods. We discuss the additional insights obtained through geolocating #michED participants as well as considerations for using geolocation and other digital methods in educational research.

This paper examines the use of social media to foster community connections within the MSU Urban Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) program. We describe the strategies employed by the program and the technologies employed by instructors to provide support, build community, and showcase learning. We highlight three particular tools used to foster community within the program: Facebook, websites and blogs, and Twitter and then use trace data from Twitter to demonstrate how social media fostered community within the program. We conclude with a description of implications for how social media is used to support community for future research and practice.

Researchers have argued that Twitter has potential to support high-quality professional development (PD) that can respond to teachers’ questions and concerns just in time and “on the spot.” Yet, very little attention has been paid to instances where Twitter has made just-in-time learning possible. In this paper, we examine one instance of timely professional development on Twitter, in which 3,598 users used an educational hashtag—#educattentats—to create a temporary affinity space supporting French teachers preparing to discuss recent terrorist attacks with their students. We describe this just-in-time PD by focusing on participants and modes of participation, the spread of the hashtag in its first hours and the growth and eventual decline of the hashtag over the course of 28 days. The results of this study suggest that #educattentats served effectively as just-in-time professional development for teachers. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Affinity spaces are digital or physical spaces in which participants interact with one another around content of shared interest and through a common portal (or platform). Among teachers, some of the largest affinity spaces may be those organized around hashtags on Twitter: These spaces are public, largely unmoderated, and thriving, yet very little is known about them, especially those based in geographical areas such as American states. This paper examines these potential affinity spaces by providing the first large-scale study of them in the form of an examination of 47 State Educational Twitter Hashtags (SETHs). Collecting over 550,000 tweets over 6 months, our analysis focused on who is participating in SETHs, how active participants are, and when participation occurred. We found support for two of Gee’s tenets of affinity spaces, in particular many interactions through a shared portal. Though the content of tweets were not the focus, this study’s findings lend support to efforts to identify which particular SETHs will be best suited to subsequent analysis of their content and what times subsequent analysis might most productively focus on. We discuss implications for how we conceive of teacher professional development and suggest directions for future research focused on the content of tweets associated with SETHs.

Twitter is increasingly accepted as an important educational technology and has been shown to serve a range of purposes. In fact, this variety suggests that Twitter has the potential to serve as a foundational technology: one capable of supporting teachers’ learning across multiple formal and informal contexts. To explore this possibility, we examined the purposes that Twitter serves in one educational technology graduate program. We collected over 9000 tweets containing any of 12 program-related hashtags and coded a sample of them to describe the purposes they served. This resulted in six themes: contribute to disciplinary conversation, engage with disciplinary conversation, build community, make connections with other communities, ask for and provide support, and unclear or irrelevant purpose. These themes—and the varied contexts they were associated with—suggest that Twitter serves as a foundational technology in this program and has the potential to do so in other educational communities.