What’s up with the research on Twitter?

Every once in while, I’ll get pinged with an inquiry about my research on administrators’ use of Twitter. It occurs to me that a lot of it is still “under review,” so below is what’s been done and what I hope will be out in the near future. I’m happy to share drafts with anyone who is interested. There are four journal articles in in total.

Paper 1: What Twitter will and will not do: Theorizing about teachers’ online professional communities. This is a conceptual paper, published in 2013 in Learning Landscapes (open access). The title sums the paper well– it elevates ideas about how to think about and research Twitter in education.

Building upon those ideas, then came the research articles, all either under review or about to be submitted.

Paper 2: Administrators’ professional learning via Twitter: The dissonance between beliefs and actions. Online professional learning and PLNs are all the rage, so this paper gets into “what’s up with administrators using Twitter.” Some of my colleagues have analyzed their tweets, but what happens when you compare their tweets to what they say they are learning? I explore the tension between what might or might not be actually learned on Twitter, including formal and informal working knowledge. What good does Twitter actually do them?

Paper 3: The dynamic roots of school leaders’ Twitter use: A structurational perspective on technology use. The title for this one sounds a lot like a paper I presented at UCEA, Administrators’ use of Twitter for professional learning: A structurational perpective, which people often Google. Some key ideas include: how uses can change over time; what concerns about online reputation can do to one’s tweeting; and the importance of social relationships in shaping technology adoption.

Paper 4: Audiences and personas: School administrators’ performances of identity on Twitter. This one hasn’t been sent out yet, so the title might change. For a lot of school leaders, the place or time of day doesn’t matter– they still have to act the part. So, this paper explores the “leader persona” online, including the differences between doing Twitter for professional learning and doing Twitter for community involvement and communication.