K Bret Staudt Willet

Florida State University | FSU · Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems

This conceptual exploration revisits a key question from earlier work (Greenhow & Gleason, 2014): What is scholarship reconsidered in the age of social media? Social scholarship is a framework that expanded Boyers’ (1990) conceptualization of scholarship to consider how social media affect discovery and research, teaching and learning, integration,...

The existing work on teacher-focused Twitter hashtags typically frames each hashtag as a single, unified phenomenon, thereby collapsing or erasing differences between them (and any resulting implications for learning). In this study, we conceived of teacher-focused hashtags as affinity spaces potentially containing subspaces distinguished by synchr...

Despite social media’s ubiquity in modern life, research on some topics related to educators’ use of social media for professional purposes remains underdeveloped, such as how use may change over time. This study explores educators’ self‐directed learning through social media by comparing change and continuity in how users contribute, interact and...

In spring 2020, K–12 schools adopted remote learning amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. Using activity theory, the authors examine the educational response to this global health crisis in the United States and the United Kingdom. Data are drawn from three to four key news media publications in each country between 1 February and 31 May 2020. The authors...

This study revisits the Carpenter and Krutka survey of how and why educators use Twitter, through exploring one of Twitter’s oldest education hashtags: #Edchat. From October 1, 2017, to June 5, 2018, more than 1.2 million unique #Edchat tweets were collected from approximately 200,000 different tweeters. Machine coding was used to answer “What type...

We report on the design, development, implementation, research, and iteration of two educational data science (EDS) workshops focused on using R and RStudio for 44 doctoral students with limited and varied EDS backgrounds. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis of pre- and post-workshop surveys, we found that participants in EDS workshops ar...

Early career teachers (ECTs) face numerous challenges during their transition from preparation programmes into professional employment contexts. Social media platforms have created many new opportunities for teachers’ ongoing professional learning by putting them in contact with other teachers from anywhere in the world. However, being connected to...

Though there is growing interest in using novel methods to analyze novel sources of educational data, numerous barriers and challenges exist for researchers and analysts seeking to learn to use educational data science methods in their work. We report on our design, development, implementation, and research of two data science workshops focused on...

Early career teachers experience numerous challenges during their transition into the profession. Reddit is a social media platform that allows users to gather around shared affinity while remaining anonymous. This study explores how early career teachers participate in the r/Teachers subreddit through posts tagged as “New Teacher” content. Hand-co...

This article synthesizes over 15 years of research on social media and learning culled from recent literature reviews, the authors' own research, and other studies. The aims of this work are threefold. First, we introduce readers to the field of social media and learning, defining key terms and emphasizing various forms of learning with and within...

Emerging practices of social media for professional purposes in higher education merit further attention. Reddit, a social media platform, is under-studied despite its significant presence. This study explores participation patterns on Reddit for two summer periods during 2019–2020, before and during COVID-19. We collected a total of 82,494 contrib...

Social media platforms host various self-directed educator professional activities. There are signs of substantial educator use of the discussion forum website Reddit, which offers affordances around anonymity. However, educators' Reddit use has received limited attention from researchers. To address this literature gap, we collected 42 months of a...

Social media use has spiked around the world during the COVID‐19 global pandemic as people reach out for news, information, social connections, and support in their daily lives. Past work on professional learning networks (PLNs) has shown that teachers also use social media to find supports for their teaching and ongoing professional development. T...

The website Reddit has received scant attention from educational researchers despite the presence of numerous teaching-related subreddits that host thousands of threaded conversations. The purpose of this study was to provide an initial comparison of discussions occurring in several different affinity spaces on Reddit. Because of the lack of releva...

Twitter has become a hub for many different types of educational conversations, denoted by hashtags and organized by a variety of affinities. Researchers have described these educational conversations on Twitter as sites for teacher professional development. Here, we studied #Edchat—one of the oldest and busiest Twitter educational hashtags—to exam...

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. I...

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...

Social media provide new opportunities for when, how, where, and with whom people learn—venue unimaginable 15 years ago. Today’s students and educators have adopted social media for various purposes both within education and outside of it. This review of the published research on social media in education focuses on the affordances for student lear...

Social media have come to play an important role in the professional lives of many educators. Platforms such as Twitter create new spaces in which collegial contact can occur, opening up various avenues for support and development. These spaces, however, can attract users whose behaviors creates challenges for researchers who try to understand and...

Accessing and contributing to online spaces have become regular parts of many educators' professional activities. However, the popular discussion forum website Reddit has received little attention from educational researchers despite the presence of multiple education-related subreddits that have tens of thousands of subscribers and feature thousan...

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 ex...

Recent academic research into the use of games for educational purposes has focused almost exclusively on video games. In this study, we explore player perceptions of board games with regards to education. We started with a large dataset of 7,806,486 reviews of 53,960 games collected from the BoardGameGeek website. We performed a keyword search for...

Teachers face numerous challenges: feeling isolated in their classrooms, overwhelmed by the demands of the job, and disappointed in traditional professional development. Prior research has pointed to Twitter as a possible solution to these challenges, so we examined teacher participation in the hashtag space #MTBoS (the mathtwitterblogosphere). We...

Recent articles in the educational research field have called for a stronger research focus on students’ learning with everyday technologies in-and-out-of classrooms and on the changing nature of scholars’ practices in light of technological advancements. We present findings from a mixed methods study of whether and how novice researchers understan...