How can we use Twitter to support a community of practice (CoP) changing practice?

To be honest, I think a CoP is necessary condition for professional learning and knowledge growth.  CoP refers to the relations between community members: mutual engagement, a shared repertoire and joint enterprise (Wenger, 1998). As the definition suggest, in a CoP, members often engage in sharing their knowledge, understanding, and ideas to achieve a common goal.  Based on my personal experience, I think engaging in a community of practice is a perfect way to improve our knowledge and skills. I still remember how little I know about the research, work ethics, study norms, and life in this program. By engaging in all kinds of social events, research mix, research team meeting with other students in one research group, and group projects, I grow my knowledge about the research, work ethics, study norms, and life in this program, and then my love in this program. Now I know very well who share the same or similar research interest with me, who have a different interest, and what scholar practices I need to participate in. For example, I know I should try to present my paper at AECT or AERA, or other related conference, and then write and publish my paper. 

Speaking of the application of social media in supporting CoP, I am thinking about integrating necessary social media tools to support my CoP in a specific research group.  Of course, Twitter, Facebook, Diigo, and Youtube would be included.

Social media like Twitter can offer a virtual space for improving our knowledge, skills, and practices in a community. As Goodyear, Casey and Kirk 2014) found, the tweets, RTs and likes could reinforce teachers’ good changing practice by passing a message “you are doing the right thing”, which developing the trust between members. I think the trust built on those tweets, RTs and likes was more important. Since community members trust in other members, they felt comfortable in sharing their feelings, attitudes, knowledge and real practices. With trust, community members felt that their tweets were valued, meaningful to others. Thus, they would rather share more about themselves and practices by Twitter.

For some members who were very active, they portrayed themselves in a new identity as star performers (Goodyear, Casey & Kirk 2014), thus promoting their engagement in Twitter-based communication. For these members, they were motivated by their high self-efficacy. When they felt confident in doing something, they would rather continuing doing that. Also, it is important to have a leader in Twitter-based communication.  In the study case, Vitoria played a big role in answering members’ questions, modeling twitter-based communication and good practices, promoting the communication between members by retweeting, likes and encouraging face-to-face talk without her. Even though Victoria as a leader for the Twitter-based conversation, she was just a facilitator for a project for a short time. The engagement of the real leader in the department was more important. By creating an account to support teachers’ changing practice, the real leader passed a message “we are together doing something right”.  This eventually signifying the CoP in a Twitter environment. I think, at this point, Twitter was not a simple communication tool. Instead, it was an online CoP.

Goodyear, V. A., Casey, A., & Kirk, D. (2014): Tweet me, message me, like me: using social media to facilitate pedagogical change within an emerging community of practice, Sport, Education and Society, 19(7), 927-943. doi: 10.1080/13573322.2013.858624

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice; learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.