Pandemic #Edchat
K. Bret Staudt Willet
July 13, 2020
Looking at #Edchat tweets during COVID-19 (March-May 2020)
We started by collecting #Edchat tweets between March 1 and May 31, 2020. This was done with four TAGS trackers:
2/20/20 - 4/17/20 (182,555 tweets)
4/17/20 - 5/6/20 (50,924 tweets)
5/6/20 - 5/26/20 (54,578 tweets)
5/26/20 - 6/16/20 (47,654 tweets)
We remove duplicate tweets and then get additional tweet metadata with lookup_many_tweets() from the {tidytags} package.
This leaves us with 266659 tweets and 100 associated variables for each tweet.
With precisely defined start (2020-03-01) and end (2020-05-31 23:59:59) times, we now have 257703 tweets remaining.
Of these 257703 total tweets, there are 91793 original tweets (i.e., not retweets), or 35.62% of #Edchat tweets between March 1 and May 31, 2020. 11023 different users contributed these original tweets.
Of the 91793 original tweets, 12901 (14.05%) contained a question.
Daily tweets
High volume tweeters
## # A tibble: 20 x 2
## screen_name n
## <chr> <int>
## 1 eduappsandmore 2193
## 2 rdene915 1420
## 3 nick_chater 1080
## 4 catlin_tucker 1071
## 5 teacherchalky1 1010
## 6 tomwhitby 752
## 7 sharemylesson 608
## 8 pledgecents 598
## 9 magicalmaths 591
## 10 college_experts 561
## 11 mcleod 538
## 12 eraser 518
## 13 erik_palmer 491
## 14 oodlu_tweets 458
## 15 chalkbeat 446
## 16 supermanduffy 430
## 17 jlubinsky 413
## 18 educatoral 402
## 19 jtm22tech 402
## 20 bobsonwong 396High volume tweeters asking questions
## # A tibble: 20 x 2
## screen_name n
## <chr> <int>
## 1 eduappsandmore 294
## 2 magicalmaths 200
## 3 rdene915 135
## 4 tomwhitby 121
## 5 catlin_tucker 110
## 6 erik_palmer 107
## 7 harveyalvy1 90
## 8 supermanduffy 78
## 9 nick_chater 76
## 10 augmentlearn 71
## 11 sgthomas1973 70
## 12 sharemylesson 70
## 13 bobsonwong 67
## 14 edcatbot 66
## 15 edsurge 63
## 16 curriculumblog 62
## 17 tcea 62
## 18 twosigmas_ 57
## 19 teacher2teacher 56
## 20 otis4educators 54A total of 3949 users asked questions in #Edchat; 223 asked at least 10 questions during the three-month period of the study. We looked at the Twitter profiles of the 223 contributors who asked at least 10 questions in #Edchat from March 1 to May 31, 2020.
We hand-coded which of these self-identified as teachers or school administrators who were not “Twitter super users.” That is, we selected 24 accounts who self-identified as teachers, did not spam #Edchat, but asked at least 10 questions in #Edchat.
We retrieved up to the 3,000 most recent tweets from these 24 users, noting the date of their earliest #Edchat tweet and question and how many #Edchat tweets and questions were part of their recent tweet history (i.e., in the most recent 3,000 tweets).
These 24 users composed 1492 recent question tweets in #Edchat, 2013 recent question tweets during the March 1-May 31 period (551 questions tweets both in #Edchat and during our timeframe), and asked 211 questions related to “covid” or “coronavirus.”
Most common URLs
## # A tibble: 20 x 2
## domain n
## <chr> <int>
## 1 tes.com/teaching-resou… 280
## 2 oodlu.org 260
## 3 sharemylesson.com/teaching-resou… 260
## 4 bit.ly/pothbooks 190
## 5 rdene915.com 166
## 6 twitter.com/mslesliedraper… 157
## 7 action.cosn.org/ctas/all-stude… 145
## 8 edweek.org/ew/articles/20… 124
## 9 edtechreview.in/trends-insight… 123
## 10 kingsumo.com/g/d1aymu/make-… 116
## 11 ift.tt/2xeb4rm 108
## 12 amzn.to/2tgevqh 100
## 13 socialexpress.com 97
## 14 sites.google.com/view/cbsdlearn… 95
## 15 happyeaster-ariescobb-onlinenews.com 92
## 16 thinkplandochicago.org/#!education-po… 92
## 17 eepurl.com/gpis0h 91
## 18 wonderexplorelearn.com 91
## 19 tweetedtimes.com/jodimos?s=rgp 88
## 20 tweetedtimes.com/search/ikrips/… 88Most common web domains
(coming later)
Location of tweeters
Comparing to tweets from a year earlier (March-May 2019)
We wanted to compare #Edchat tweets during the COVID-19 pandemic (March 1 to May 31, 2020) with those from a year earlier (March 1 to May 31, 2019). We again used four TAGS trackers:
2/25/19 - 3/9/19 (50,319 tweets)
3/8/19 - 3/29/19 (86,736 tweets)
3/28/19 - 5/6/19 (148,701 tweets)
5/5/19 - 6/1/19 (100,469 tweets)
We remove duplicate tweets and then retrieve additional tweet metadata with lookup_many_tweets() from the {tidytags} package.
This leaves us with 266659 tweets and 100 associated variables for each tweet.
With precisely defined start (2019-03-01) and end (2019-05-31 23:59:59) times, we now have 332067 tweets remaining.
Of these 332067 total tweets, there are 107314 original tweets (i.e., not retweets), or 32.32% of #Edchat tweets between March 1 and May 31, 2020. 11493 different users contributed these original tweets.
Of the 107314 original tweets, 15584 (14.52%) contained a question.
Daily tweets
High volume tweeters
## # A tibble: 20 x 2
## screen_name n
## <chr> <int>
## 1 eduappsandmore 2201
## 2 eraser 1656
## 3 shakeuplearning 1339
## 4 teacherchalky1 1311
## 5 rdene915 1125
## 6 bryanlmiller 1075
## 7 drkatrinaadkins 933
## 8 edreimagined 747
## 9 pledgecents 714
## 10 edsurge 687
## 11 jtm22tech 642
## 12 sharemylesson 635
## 13 mindshiftkqed 617
## 14 erik_palmer 577
## 15 learnocracy 538
## 16 airhead_edu 534
## 17 usingtechbetter 529
## 18 mikereading 526
## 19 supermanduffy 458
## 20 satisphactionio 454High volume tweeters asking questions
## # A tibble: 20 x 2
## screen_name n
## <chr> <int>
## 1 eduappsandmore 300
## 2 ukedmag 155
## 3 erik_palmer 148
## 4 rdene915 146
## 5 shakeuplearning 133
## 6 edurolearning 130
## 7 cpcoofficial 120
## 8 teachertoolkit 120
## 9 edsurge 111
## 10 twosigmas_ 108
## 11 harveyalvy1 106
## 12 sharemylesson 104
## 13 elemenous 94
## 14 bryanlmiller 91
## 15 supermanduffy 90
## 16 lookforsun 89
## 17 mraspinall 84
## 18 newtechnetwork 81
## 19 mashupmath 80
## 20 lit_teachers 76Daily tweets comparison: 2019 vs. 2020
Comparing daily number of questions asked, 2019 vs. 2020
Comparing daily number of original tweets, 2019 vs. 2020
Comparing daily number of retweets, 2019 vs. 2020
Daily question tweet comparison: 2019 vs. 2020
The mean percentage of question tweets was 14.39 in 2019 and 13.96 in 2020. The difference between these means was not statistically significant (p = 0.0875).
Comparing top hashtags in 2020 vs. 2019
To what extent have #Edchat topics of conversation been co-opted by COVID-19?
To answer this question, we examined hashtags occurring alongside #Edchat in our tweet corpus.
## # A tibble: 20 x 7
## hashtag n_2020 p_2020 n_2019 p_2019 p_change_raw p_change
## <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
## 1 edtech 20251 22.1 24767 27.0 -4.92 -18.2
## 2 education 13883 15.1 17661 19.2 -4.12 -21.4
## 3 remotelearning 8105 8.83 0 0 8.83 Inf
## 4 k12 5728 6.24 5976 6.51 -0.270 -4.15
## 5 distancelearning 5046 5.5 0 0 5.5 Inf
## 6 covid19 4525 4.93 0 0 4.93 Inf
## 7 teachers 4065 4.43 6163 6.71 -2.28 -34.0
## 8 elearning 3606 3.93 3260 3.55 0.38 10.7
## 9 edutwitter 3597 3.92 875 0.95 2.97 313.
## 10 teaching 3227 3.52 4327 4.71 -1.19 -25.3
## 11 onlinelearning 2958 3.22 428 0.47 2.75 585.
## 12 ukedchat 2744 2.99 3958 4.31 -1.32 -30.6
## 13 coronavirus 2640 2.88 0 0 2.88 Inf
## 14 edtechchat 2458 2.68 2157 2.35 0.33 14.0
## 15 aussieed 2399 2.61 2886 3.14 -0.53 -16.9
## 16 educhat 2323 2.53 2049 2.23 0.300 13.4
## 17 tlap 2108 2.3 2496 2.72 -0.42 -15.4
## 18 learning 2022 2.2 2853 3.11 -0.910 -29.3
## 19 highered 1935 2.11 2913 3.17 -1.06 -33.4
## 20 suptchat 1856 2.02 1931 2.1 -0.08 -3.81
To visualize the change in hashtags occurring alongside #Edchat, we created a heatmap of any of the top-100 hashtags that saw a 50% or more change between 2019 and 2020.
The 25 hashtags that saw a large change between 2019 and 2020 were:
We see that 21637 #Edchat original tweets (23.57%) in 2020 contained at least one of these 25 hashtags whose frequency had increased at least 50% from 2019.
devtools::session_info()
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## date 2020-07-15
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