I am a drama teacher at a secondary school in Salford. Like many drama teachers, I am a single person department – and whilst there are strengths to this position, the lack of colleagues can be very isolating. In past three years, twitter has become my team, the virtual colleague. Cue the super hero music and cape, like every colleague twitter can do and be so many things to you:

• Twitter Listens
• Twitter Advises
• Twitter offers comic relief
• Twitter can irritate
• Twitter can create friendships
• Twitter can be divisive

I am a better teacher because of my involvement in twitter. It makes me reflect on my own practice through exposure to other people’s practice. It helps me to keep abreast of new technologies and ideas and whilst I don’t prescribe evangelically to one technique like the taxonomy crew – using their ideas and creating my own Smörgåsbord of teaching techniques definitely helps me to offer my students a variety of ways to engage in my lessons and with my subject.

As a part time teacher, twitter allows me to engage with these virtual colleagues when and as I can – I very rarely get to the staff room and until recently had no desk in my faculties team room. When I joined twitter, this really saved me from feeling very alone and rather vulnerable. It helped me feel connected to the wider profession of teaching; actually I think it made me aware of THE PROFESSION and to begin to believe it was there.

But my favourite thing about twitter, the very best thing, is that it is our own domain – I don’t do it because OFSTED, the Secretary of State, the unions or the Senior Managers at my school tell me to. It is about teachers leading learning in the best interest of the students we teach. It echoes a long held belief of mine, felt by many, but ignored by those in power – politicians shouldn’t be leading the changes in education, our profession should.

Just don’t ask me how…yet.

So after being left with a series of questions and problems at the end of research paper two (handed in, in May) I was trying to solve the methodological issues of exactly how to capture informal learning in action between individuals.

At the time I was writing up research paper 1, I had reactivated my Twitter account and begun to follow teachers and others who were tweeting about teaching and learning. Here, I discovered a group of individuals interacting and sharing knowledge and ideas informally. What made it really special was I could see it happen on the screen in front of me.

When my supervisor – the wonderful Prof Alan Dyson, was presenting a workshop to us he stated ‘this paper is where if you want to try something different, you can, even if it all goes wrong’… never say that to me… I love doing something different…

Research paper 2 has focused on using a problem structuring method to illuminate the complexity of the interactions between individuals in the virtual community. Soft Systems Methodology conceptualises a situation where people are undertaking purposeful action as a system. As a group we are undertaking purposeful action – trying to improve our practice, to solve that problem of teaching better and better. Soft Systems structures this process in that we get involved in this action, but we are unable to predict the outcome from undertaking this activity. We cannot say predict what will happen to each individual in the system, merely that there will be an output – whatever that may be for the individual.

Without overloading you with the whole method and its underlying assumptions and ideas, there are two main stages that I undertook. Firstly, the building of a rich picture about the situation and then building ideal ‘systems models’ or ‘human activity systems’ that show the steps to achieve the transformation (in this case, the teacher’s practice).

So with this in mind, I had to spend rather a lot of time on Twitter watching the interactions and discussions that flowed through my timeline. What I was looking for were people sharing their ideas, knowledge, skills, or advice with others and then other picking up and using the ideas in their own schools. Sometimes the final stage was that the second person then fed back into the community how successful an idea was, how they modified it and what they saw as the benefit. I also looked at the types of things that were retweeted and the general discussions that happened. When I chose to tweet it was as a teacher, not as a researcher and I often forgot that I was researching this community as well as being a member of it.

What interesting tweets did I see? Well @oldandrewuk always provided an alternative viewpoint and caused at least one debate over teaching pedagogy. There were the stream of ‘fish jokes’ that also appeared and yes – I got them in the research paper. There was a lot of sharing little tips of knowledge but more importantly people then took those tips, used them, modified them and tweeted feedback into the community. This was brilliant for letting me see the impact of a particular idea on someone. Often it was modified, sometimes it set people off to produce new resources using a template, but was important was the feedback that showed that this had impacted on your practice.

What appears as a stream of tweets actually has more patterns than I ever expected. I used those patterns to construct a ‘rich picture’ of some of the things that were happening in the community. This can be downloaded here…and notice that it is version 7 – it was modified with more and more data. This rich picture helped me see what key processes and actions were being undertaken by people in their ‘purposeful action’ to improve their teaching. That is not to say we all agreed about how to go about it and that we all viewed everything the same way.

The main idea is that we are all acting purposefully in trying to improve our practice. The next stage of SSM is to construct model of human activity systems – ideal models of how to carry out this activity.

For our network to be successful we have to share what we know, have tried or understand and for someone to pick up and use an idea that someone has shared, they have to evaluate it and implement it in their classroom against the criteria they set for success. If we did not share our knowledge then it wouldn’t be passed to another individual, equally not all pieces of knowledge are collected by others and used – there is a selection and evaluation process at that end.

However, from all of this there are more questions…

Kenny Pieper and I had a discussion at Pedagoo Christmas Party about some of these models and he commented about ‘do I trust the source?’ – this was something that I had never considered. How do we build trust in our network? How do we decide who to follow and who we don’t?

Further on in this, more questions emerged.. how do we know that we know something and then decide to share it? Why do we choose to share in this community? How do we choose what ideas to use and reject? How do we evaluate the tweet responses to our tweets?

So just as I finished research paper 1 with a stream of unanswered questions – I’m left at the end of research paper 2 with another bunch. But this is the great thing about EdD research – it takes you wherever you want to go with your interests.

This was perhaps the hardest piece of academic work I have EVER done. I had to read up on a new methodology, apply it in a setting that had not been done before, with a new data set (tweets) and make some sense of it… in the words of my supervisor – ‘you made it difficult for yourself’.

Yet the feedback from my supervisor and second marker has boosted my confidence – original and exciting – the two things you want to hear about your doctoral research. That said… I’ve still got lots of work to do.

If you want to read it… try here.. http://purpleelf.edublogs.org/2013/04/07/teacher-learning-via-twitter-part-2/

As many of you know if you follow me on Twitter I am studying for an EdD (Doctorate in Education). My route through this consists of three research papers in the first two years before the final research and thesis taking the remaining four years of the course.

Research paper one was a literature review; a scoping exercise to see what the current research says about the area I was interested in – in my case – teacher informal learning. So what was out there? Not very much that focused on how teachers learn from each other in informal settings, most research on teacher learning focuses on traditional or formal CPD. This meant that I had to widen my search to look at informal learning in other contexts including engineering and nursing.

Out of this came two main theoretical approaches – the work of Etienne Wenger and the communities of practice theory and Engestrom’s activity theory. Honestly, I didn’t read that much into the activity theory as it didn’t focus on informal learning so much as collaboration between professionals. While the communities of practice framework provided a more fruitful avenue to venture down. This is where as a doctoral student you start realising that no research is perfect. Research comes with assumptions, from particular viewpoints, sometimes to describe and sometimes to explain phenomena. Any method has its advantages and disadvantages and a good researcher takes this into account when selecting a particular approach.

So then I started picking apart research papers, looking at those assumptions, viewpoints, advantages and disadvantages, finding gaps that have not been explained or described, bringing together multiple papers to synthesise into a whole that then generates yet more questions. Wenger’s communities of practice framework came from the idea that ‘if learning is not the result of teaching, how does it happen?’ and while unpacking the research in this area I was somewhat unconvinced by it. Wenger’s website now describes it as

‘A community of practice is a group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do, and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly’

but at the time I read the book and papers – he hadn’t put it quite so clearly! This still left me with the question – how do ideas move from one person to another?

I looked outside this to research into workplace learning and found the work of Michael Eraut, whose research projects have interviewed and analysed different activities that individuals undertake in the workplace. They learn from many of these and more importantly for my research, many of them involved interactions with others.

So I reached the end of paper 1, unconvinced that communities of practice really existed, with a list of workplace activities that help people learn, but with no real explanation of how, when and why ‘knowledge’ was transferred between individuals. If I was to capture interactions between individuals to see ‘knowledge’ transfer – how could I do this as most interactions are informal, casual and often fleeting in a school day? Diaries? Observations? There was a problem I needed to solve to look at informal learning…

Then I joined Twitter….

to download the full paper go to http://purpleelf.edublogs.org/2013/03/24/teacher-learning-via-twitter-part-1/