Vermont's new leading role online

In today's podcast, Mark Olofson talks with Joshua Rosenberg and Spencer Greenhalgh, education researchers from Michigan State University. Their research focuses on the state-level twitter conversations among educators: who is doing it, and what they're getting out of it.

And, spoiler alert, when they looked around the country, Vermont emerged as a pretty special place.

Connections. Sharing. We all thrive when we're able to talk with other folks who share common values and face common challenges. One way for educators to meet each other, talk about what they're doing, and share ideas is through social media. Here in Vermont, educators use the hashtag #vted to connect with each other on twitter.

This state educational twitter hashtag allows for local community-building and discussion where we share a common policy context. But this phenomena isn't unique to Vermont.

 

 

Mark Olofson: This is Mark Olofson with Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education and we’ve got a couple of other researchers with us today. Guys could you just tell us your names and where you’re at?

Josh Rosenberg: Yeah. Sure. I’ll go first if you don’t mind, Spencer. My name is Josh Rosenberg and I am a graduate student at Michigan State University and before graduate school I was a high school Biology and Earth Science and Chemistry teacher.

Spencer Greenhalgh: I’m Spencer Greenhalgh. I am also at Michigan State University. Josh and I are both in MSU’s Educational psychology and Educational Technology Program. I am in my fourth year there and where I do research on things like teacher's use of Twitter. Josh and I do a couple of different kinds of Twitter research actually but one area that we’ve really been interested in is what we call SETHs or State Educational Twitter Hashtags. We’re particularly interested in this because as local as you can get with Twitter… we talk about Twitter being something that can connect people from all across the world and that’s a wonderful ability that it has. But people are also using it in sort of geographically defined ways and we wanted to get a picture of what that looked like across the United States.

Josh Rosenberg: It’s cool. It’s ambitious. It’s inspiring. We don’t know a lot more about what to really make of this new opportunity, whether it’s for us as teachers to share resources we create or resources we find. Whether it’s a chance for us to connect with others. We came to this research largely through participating in the same communities, or the same hashtags in this case, and through participating in them we saw an opportunity to possibly collect data on what was going on and just start to create a portrait of what was going on, kind of as a first step and building on some kind of newer work on Twitter and education.

Mark Olofson: What types of things do you see educators doing on Twitter?

Josh Rosenberg: We see them tweeting a lot. Over six months we looked at lists of hashtags that other folks had created and we did our best to find a hashtag for every state and we found more than half a million tweets over six months. This is the first six months of 2015 and we have some more recent data including Vermont hashtag #vted, for this most recent year. But they’re talking about a lot of different things.

Spencer Greenhalgh: Teachers are using Twitter to build community and we expected this to be a sort of very professionally-driven thing and don’t get us wrong, it is but at the same time, we also saw teachers who are just shouting the breeze. They’re connecting with people that they haven’t seen in a while. Or maybe people that they only know through Twitter. They’re chatting and they’re having a good time. Anything from building community to also contributing to...