Internet technologies may provide new spaces for churches that are facing challenges in geographic spaces. These online spaces can be understood as distinct online spaces or as extensions of geographic spaces. We consider the Beyond the Walls online ministry provided by the Toronto Congregation of Community of Christ, a denomination with a growing global footprint and a shrinking population in the Global North. Examining worship services between January 2020 and January 2022, we consider the locations and languages represented in Beyond the Walls services, the distribution and social network of contributing individuals, and how the services performed on Facebook and YouTube. We found that online ministry allowed Beyond the Walls to draw from a larger, more geographically and linguistically diverse population than in-person services could have, possibly responding to denominational concerns. We also illustrate the ways that this ministry corresponds with both distinct and extended understandings of space in the online church.

The affinity space framework has proven useful for explaining and understanding teacher activity on social media platforms. In this study, we explore the ‘dark side’ of teacher affinity spaces by documenting a partisan teachers’ group on an alternative social media platform. We used a mix of a priori and emergent coding to analyse screenshots of posts and comments from a public teachers’ group and group administrators’ activity on the broader platform. Findings indicate that although the group administrators began with a focus on teachers, most participants were non-teachers with political (rather than professional) concerns about US education. Furthermore, administrators both freely engaged with political talking points in their activity outside the teachers’ group and allowed the broader platform culture—including conspiratorial thinking, explicit racism and out-group villainization—to seep in. We conclude by describing how these findings correspond with the key characteristics of an affinity space, including an overlapping of affinities, a lack of concern for professional qualifications, and influence from the broader platform. These findings provide an illustrative example of how teacher affinity spaces can drift from their stated intention within the larger platform context.

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.

There is an abundance of scholarship documenting educators’ uses of for-profit social media platforms for professional learning, but little is known about how inauthentic accounts affect those experiences. We studied 83 state-sponsored accounts’ interactions with the teacher-focused #Edchat hashtag by analyzing their profiles, profiles of accounts they retweeted, and tweets they shared. We found no patterns of overt state interference in #Edchat; however, state-sponsored accounts amplified other inauthentic accounts, such as those focused on commercial, spam, and self-promoting #Edchat messages. Most state accounts used formulaic methods to create relatable account profiles that may go unnoticed by educators using the hashtag. These findings raise questions for educators and researchers about disinformation, anonymity, attention-seeking, and information glut in social media environments polluted by inauthentic amplification.

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.

Teachers participate in professional learning activities to enhance their pedagogical knowledge and share best practices—and the increasing role of technologies in education, including social media, is shifting how this professional learning occurs. The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to consider the role of social media for professional learning. Using intensive longitudinal methods, we repeatedly surveyed 14 teachers’ use of social media both before and during the pandemic (N = 386 total responses). We found patterns in social media platforms uptake and their purposes, but teachers’ use of social media was largely idiosyncratic. Also, teachers demonstrated notable shifts in social media use after the pandemic started; multilevel models indicated that teachers were more likely to use social media to connect and share, especially, as well as learn and follow, compared with before the pandemic. Higher levels of COVID-19-related family stress were also associated with more use of social media to find materials.

‘Alternative’ social media platforms like Parler and Gab—on which hate speech and conspiracy theories often exist unchecked—present an opportunity for instructional designers and other education professionals to revisit assumptions about informal learning on social media. Employing a conceptual framework that distinguishes education from miseducation, we use these controversial platforms to argue that educators should more fully consider: 1) the miseducation happening in learning spaces, 2) how the design of educational technologies may amplify miseducation, and 3) the importance that formal education resist miseducation.

A general suspicion of Mormonism in American politics and media dates back to the 19th century and continues today. Weber (2019) has described Mormonism as a ‘meme’ that is malleable enough to symbolize different things for different audiences in different contexts. In this study, I examine the presence of ‘Mormonism as meme’ in 511 posts composed by government-sponsored Twitter accounts as part of information operations before, during, and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. I retrieved these posts from a dataset of government-sponsored tweets made available by Twitter and used a mix of computational and human methods to determine: 1) which countries used Mormonism as meme, 2) whether government-sponsored accounts originated or amplified these messages, 3) what identities government-sponsored accounts adopted, and 4) how government-sponsored accounts used Mormonism as a meme. This study’s results indicate that six governments invoked Mormonism as part of their information operations during this time frame. Venezuela pursued a strategy that depended on using pro-Trump accounts to repeatedly share messages describing Mormons as communitarian and insular. Other countries (including Russia and Iran) pursued more subtle strategies, more often retweeting others’ posts than writing their own. However, they still invoked aspects of Mormonism that called into question its compatibility with liberal, conservative, or broadly American values. As a whole, these posts correspond with both Weber’s (2019) description of Mormonism as malleable meme and information operations’ twin purposes of influencing the 2016 election and dividing Americans.

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.

Twitter hashtags may serve as valuable means for teachers’ professional development. However, given the diversity of hashtag spaces and teacher needs, teachers must assess a given hashtag and compare it to their learning needs and preferences before determining whether it would be helpful. To support this reflection, I examine data associated with 60 Regional Educational Twitter Hashtags (RETHs) during the first six months of 2016 to begin describing the variety of teacher learning-focused Twitter spaces and make distinctions between them. My results indicate that these RETHs vary according to their relative focus on sharing, intimacy of personal connection, and volume of activity, each of which has implications for professional development. The dimensions resulting from this study may prove helpful for teachers, teacher educators, and hashtag coordinators.

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.