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.

Background. Player-generated reviews of video games represent a large, rich, and under-explored source of data for exploring what makes for an effective game. Aim. We explore whether existing theory, in the form of a comprehensive gaming taxonomy, suitably captures the issues that players raise when they review games. Method. User-submitted game reviews were coded along the dimensions of the comprehensive gaming taxonomy to test the frequency of usage of each dimension. Results. We found some support for the use of the taxonomy, as four of nine taxonomy features were frequently present in game reviews. We also found support for other features of reviews not encapsulated by the Bedwell et al. (2012) taxonomy. Specifically, we found that players often reviewed video games: a) holistically; b) by comparing them to other games, game franchises, and other reviews; and c) by judging the value of games in terms of time, money, and effort. These results have implications for using game reviews for future research.

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.