On Thursday morning, I presented some work I’ve been doing with Dan Krutka at a session of the Association of Educational Communications and Technology. Here’s the title and abstract of our presentation:

Teachers on Far-Right Social Media: The Dark Side of Affinity Spaces for Informal Learning

We present the results of our studying a teachers’ group on a far-right social media platform. The identity of the platform and the persistence of far-right agenda setting overwhelmed any educational intentions of the group, which therefore had little to offer teachers looking to improve their craft. Our findings offer an opportunity to revisit theoretical frameworks and other perspectives that are common in the literature on teachers’ use of social media.

One paper that I read and reread as I was starting to get into Twitter research was Anatoliy Gruzd, Barry Wellman, and Yuri Takhteyev’s “Imagining Twitter as an Imagined Community,” published in a 2011 issue of American Behavioral Scientist. I thought of this paper again yesterday; more specifically, I thought about the anecdote that the article begins with:

Barry and Beverly Wellman moved to Toronto more than 40 years ago. Not being able to get a public school job at first, Beverly went to teach English-language subjects at a Jewish day school. She lived downtown and commuted to the suburbs. One day the principal asked her,