Christian Fischer

Teachers turn to many sources for support and professional learning, including social media-based communities that have shown promise to help teachers access resources and facilitate productive exchanges. Although such online communities show promise, questions about their quality for providing a suitable learning environment remain insufficiently answered. In this study, we examine how teachers’ engagement on Twitter (now known as “X”) may adhere to characteristics of high-quality professional development (PD) activities. In that, we employ advanced conversational analysis techniques that extend the primarily descriptive methods used in prior research. Specifically, we collected data from three Twitter communities related to Advanced Placement Biology (N = 2,040 tweets, N = 93 teachers). Qualitative two-cycle content analyses derived both tweet content and sentiment. Using epistemic network analyses, we examined the collaborative structures to examine how participation patterns can identify characteristics of high-quality online PD. Results indicate that some teachers use Twitter with a content focus and coherent to their individual contexts and prior knowledge. Notably, differences in collaboration and participation patterns by teachers’ overall activity level hint at the existence of an online community of practice. More active teachers communicated more about how their individual contexts relate to instruction, whereas less active teachers exhibited more targeted engagement, for instance, related to sharing teaching resources and organizing learning opportunities. Overall, this study illustrates how Twitter may provide a meaningful learning environment to teachers so that it can serve as a relevant avenue for their professional learning.

The release and rapid diffusion of ChatGPT have caught the attention of educators worldwide. Some educators are enthusiastic about its potential to support learning. Others are concerned about how it might circumvent learning opportunities or contribute to misinformation. To better understand reactions about ChatGPT concerning education, we analyzed Twitter data (16,830,997 tweets from 5,541,457 users). Based on topic modeling and sentiment analysis, we provide an overview of global perceptions and reactions to ChatGPT regarding education. ChatGPT triggered a massive response on Twitter, with education being the most tweeted content topic. Topics ranged from specific (e.g., cheating) to broad (e.g., opportunities), which were discussed with mixed sentiment. We traced that authority decisions may influence public opinions. We discussed that the average reaction on Twitter (e.g., using ChatGPT to cheat in exams) differs from discussions in which education and teaching–learning researchers are likely to be more interested (e.g., ChatGPT as an intelligent learning partner). This study provides insights into people's reactions when new groundbreaking technology is released and implications for scientific and policy communication in rapidly changing circumstances.

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