Sparse, Pair-Wise, Emotion-Focused Interactions: Educators’ Networking Patterns on Twitter at Early Pandemic

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by nayy☆

COVID-19期间，教育工作者为教学支持、社交与情绪需求愈发依赖社交媒体。本研究基于公共Twitter数据，采用混合方法分析远程教学过渡初期（2020年3月末至4月初）潜在教育者的网络与话语互动。结果显示教育者在Twitter上的支持网络稀疏，主要由小型且相对排他的社区构成，以一对一互动为主。主题分析表明信息性与养护性支持在教育者发帖中相对均衡，尤以教学内容知识与感激表达为突出。

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages17

Reading Time43 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Background on COVID-19 and educators’ needs

Social media and personal learning networks (PLNs)

Twitter as a research and support platform

Prior research and identified methodological gap

OPEN ACCESS Research Article Contemporary Educational Technology, 2022, 14(3), ep373 ISSN: 1309-517X (Online) Sparse, Pair-Wise, Emotion-Focused Interactions: Educators’Networking Patterns on Twitter at Early Pandemic Yiyun Fan 1* 0000-0003-3749-5759 Kathlyn Elliott 1 0000-0002-5467-0814 1 Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA * [Corresponding author:](Corresponding author: yiyunfanfan@gmail.com)[ yiyunfanfan@gmail.com](Corresponding author: yiyunfanfan@gmail.com) Citation: Fan, Y., & Elliott, K. (2022) . Sparse, Pair-Wise, Emotion-Focused Interactions: Educators’ Networking Patterns on Twitter at Early Pandemic. Contemporary Educational Technology, 14(3), ep373. [https://doi.org/10.30935/cedtech/12058](https://doi.org/10.30935/cedtech/12058) ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT | Received: 15 Jan 2022
Accepted: 21 Apr 2022 | Educators have increasingly turned to social media for their instructional, social, and emotional needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to see where support and professional development would be needed and how the educational community interacted online, we sought to use existing Twitter data to examine potential educators’ networking and discourse patterns. Specifically, this mixed-methods study explores how educators used Twitter as a platform to seek and share resources and support during the transition to remote teaching around the start of massive school closures due to the pandemic. Based on a public COVID-19 Twitter chatter database, tweets from late March to early April 2020 were searched using educational keywords and analyzed using social network analysis and thematic analysis. Social network analysis findings indicate that the support networks for educators on Twitter were sparse and consisted of mainly small, exclusive communities. The networks featured one-onone interactions during the early pandemic, highlighting that there were few large conversations that most educators were part of but rather many small ones. Thematic analysis findings further suggest that both informational and nurturant support were relatively equally present on Twitter among educators, particularly pedagogical content knowledge and gratitude. This study adds to an understanding of the educational networks as a means of professional and personal support. Additionally, findings present the discourse featured in educator networks at the onset of an educational emergency (i.e., COVID-19) as decentralized as well as desiring pedagogical content knowledge and emotional sharing.
Keywords: data science applications in education, emergency online learning, Twitter, teacher professional development, social network analysis | | --- | --- | | INTRODUCTION | | Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, over 60% of students were not in school worldwide in 2020 (UNESCO, 2020) . Even in the best times, switching from face-to-face to online/hybrid teaching environments poses challenges to teachers; these challenges include but are not limited to technological use, online pedagogy, time management, communication barriers, and the changing role (Jacobs & Rogers, 1997; Kebritchi et al., 2017) . These changes require additional competencies and skills (Darabi et al., 2006), including the technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK) for technological integration in teaching proposed by Mishra and Koehler (2006) . For many educators, the challenges go beyond switching to unfamiliar teaching environments to issues of work-life balance, child/elderly care, economic instabilities, and psychological traumas associated with the pandemic (e.g., Hjálmsdóttir & Bjarnadóttir, 2021; Purwanto et al., 2020) . If teachers cannot obtain the personal and professional support they need to adapt to this new instruction version, students, particularly poor and historically marginalized students, may fall behind. Teachers often turn to social media for personalized professional development by creating “personal learning networ

FAQs

本研究使用了什么数据与方法？

研究基于公共COVID-19 Twitter热度数据库，检索2020年3月末至4月初的相关推文，并结合社交网络分析与主题分析进行混合方法研究。

教育者在Twitter上的网络结构呈现怎样的特征？

社交网络分析表明教育者支持网络稀疏，主要由小型、相对独立的社区构成；早期疫情中以一对一互动为主，缺少让大多数教育者共同参与的大型对话。

主题分析发现了哪些支持类型与内容倾向？

主题分析显示信息性支持与养护性支持在教育者Twitter内容中相对均衡，尤其体现为教学内容知识与表达感激的高出现度。

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by nayy☆