Education will never be a trending topic

Anybody who spends any significant time on Twitter is familiar with the concept of trending topics. They’re essentially a taste of what’s on people’s minds and typically revolve around recent news, television events, buzz generating blog posts and of course, memes.

At large conferences like NECC, with hundreds of people using the #NECC09 hashtag in their tweets, some people speculated whether it would become a trending topic or not. The answer was a resounding No.

It has always been a mystery to me as to just how many posts were required to make it into the trending topics list, and recently Buzzgain published their own research of the subject. The results?

Between 12 (midnight) to 6 am PDT: approximately 1200 tweets and about 500 users to be trending

Between 6 am to 12 Noon PDT: 1700 tweets and about 733 users

Between 12 noon to 6 pm: 1500 tweets and about 812 users (this may be because there are more people during this time but they tweet a lot less)

Between 6 pm to 12 midnight: 1900 tweets and about 922 users

So at best, during the overnight hours when traffic is lowest, it would take about 1200 tweets using a given hashtag to become at trending topic. Not only that, considering that according to their research, a trending topic has an average shelf life of about 11 minutes, there would need to be more than 100 tweets per minute for it to attain the ‘weight’ needed.

While there may be 139,665 people in the education directory of Twellow, you have to go several hundred deep just to wade past all the social media junkies obsessed with gaining the most followers.

I don’t know how many ‘real’ educators there are on Twitter, but I do know that there just aren’t enough to make a dent in the Twitterverse on a mass scale. In fact, it’s futile to even put any efforts in trying to effect real change there. It’s wonderful for making connections and sharing ideas, but it’s just not the right place to effect any significant change. No matter how loud the choir sings, it’s just not going to be heard above the clamor about Harry Potter and Michael Jackson (no connection between the two implied).

As popular as Twitter is, as popular as Facebook is, they are both still used by only a fraction of educators, and within that fraction, they only reach the niche audience you have. I’m grateful to have a fairly large audience on Twitter, but even so that’s still less than 5,000 people, and of those I know a large number likely registered and never logged in again.

It isn’t that there isn’t value information being communicated via Twitter. It’s just a shame that it’s only causing small ripples and then disappearing into the ether.

The reality is, ‘old school’ communications are still the most effective for dealing with the masses. Email and newsletters still carry quite a bit of weight, and from my own experience tend to reach much farther than a tweet or blog post.

With that in mind I’m curious to hear your ideas for getting the ‘big ideas’ and key conversations out to the masses. Should we be aggregating them together and creating a “Tales from the Eduverse” mailing list? Sending out a newsletter in print or via email?

The critical question being, if the ‘right’ ideas are being shared in the blogosphere/TwitterPlurkoverse, how do we communicate them out to the rest of the education community?

7 Comments

Gail
7/17/2009

Good reflection here, Steve. I have puzzled over the communication question myself. I teach kindergarten and write a newsletter pretty much weekly. I send a hard copy, black and white version home on Fridays and post a link on my blog to a pdf version for family and friends of the students as well as any other interested parties. I get great feedback from some parents, those who want to know what’s going on at school. It helps them to frame questions for dialogue about the class, friends, learning experiences, etc. I understand that some other school parents have checked it out as well and wish their children’s teachers would do something like that. But then there is the other side, the children whose parents don’t even empty the backpack regularly so I find 2 week old newsletters inside while I’m looking for their lunch money.
My suspicion is that parents would be more apt to check out the newsletter if they were my friends on Facebook (not gonna happen.) So it would appear that the subject of education would be even less important than reading about their own kids. It’s really okay though. I’m not following the nuclear proliferation tweets or newsletters and they should be important to me as well.
Gail´s last blog ..Reflections on Teaching and Learning

Maria Turner
7/17/2009

It’s like pondering grains of sand in the desert…leading a horse to water…As educators we all know that Blogs/Twitters/Emails/Cyberland is the place to be…but I don’t think we can really agree where. I think the rate of really “great” stuff is just overwhelming. I personally would like a technology secretary to sort it all for me (Thanks, Steve, for unknowingly doing part of this job for me!) As educators, we need to strike out, stake a claim, and make it ours, even if it’s just a portion. I say we invade Twitter. I pledge to recruit every teacher/educator/administrator I know. Sound like a plan?

Maria Turner
7/17/2009

ok, new thought…I was just writing up my response to your blog for a class I’m taking, when I wrote that there should be a Facebook for Teachers…TeachBook, where you could sign up by grade level, subject area, areas of interest and discuss, vent, chat, compare, with your colleagues in a Facebook type format. If I were a computer genius, I would make such a thing and be rich and famous….but, since I’m barely able to BLOG or Twitter, I thought I’d share the information…it certainly would be a way to get the word out…

Leslie Healey (healigan)
7/18/2009

I love the idea of TeacherBook! I teach high school English, and besides taking a PBWorks summer camp and setting up my newest wiki for next fall, I’m reading–books, poetry, drama–to update my picks for whatever will get my students reading and thinking. Sooner or later, the tools have to serve the content. Twitter just has to wait.
Leslie Healey (healigan)´s last blog ..FOR ALL MY SENIORS: THE WORLD IS YOURS NOW.

Bea
7/19/2009

Despite being a Twitter sort of person, I don’t think we need to get EVERYONE on Twitter ASAP. The way I see it, those of us who tweet have local audiences of sorts. Whatever I find of value on Twitter, I share at my own school, face-to-face, on my blog, via email. I share with teachers who will find it most relevant. You also have to remember that good ideas won’t be a flash in the pan. They will be repeated, retweeted and blogged about, for days, weeks, or longer. Twitter is good for spreading ideas and sharing resources, but Twitter messages are evanescent. Any attempt to bottle tweets, to give them a longer shelf life, is an attempt to rewind the clock and make Twitter what other things have already been (newsletters and subscription emails).

There is no rush to Tweet. Eventually all educators will find their own way of keeping up, or they’ll be pushed out of the way (hopefully?).
Bea´s last blog ..My Cup of AppleADE

Maryann Molishus
7/19/2009

I spent the week at Constructing Modern Knowledge. I was fortunate to get to listen to Deborah Meier speak about education. One of the things she said was that educators are not very good at marketing ourselves and what we are doing well. Many of us now have the tools and know-how to do it, but we need to realize the importance of “selling” our product. Another speaker, Lella Gandini, spoke of the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education. Briefly, this method of education was brought to the United States from Reggio Emilia, Italy. She explained that one of the reasons the schools in this town gained “fame” is that they are so good at documenting the learning and are thus able to share it with others. What we need is good documentation, good PR, and we need to use all the tools we have to get the word out about what we are doing. And don’t forget, we don’t just have the teachers, we have the children! And they are way better at this “tech stuff” and way, way better at “showing off” than we are!! And if your child created a newsletter, blog, video, etc., wouldn’t you want to see it…
Maryann Molishus´s last blog ..Outside the NECC Walls

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