Fernando Rosell-Aguilar – @frosellaguilar
The Open University

When Twitter launched in 2006, few would have predicted the impact it would have in many fields including news delivery and discussion, the entertainment industry, politics, and education among others. Twitter has become a social media tool where meaningful and engaged conversations can take place. Of the 500 million tweets sent every day, 4.2 million are from educators (Hill, 2014), who share their work, ideas and thoughts through Twitter. As many schools around the globe suffer cuts to their funding for Continuous Professional Development (CPD), some teachers have taken to Twitter as a replacement for formal learning opportunities through conversations, sharing ideas and resources.

An example of teachers coming together through a hashtag is the #mfltwitterati. The #mfltwitterati share thoughts, ideas and practices, resources, joys and frustrations alike. In an effort to understand whether the tweeting activity has an effect on classroom practice, The research questions the study aimed to answer were:

 1 Who are the #mfltwitterati? This involves profiling the participants: sex, where they live, where they teach, and what subjects they teach.

2 Do the practices of the #mfltwitterati provide evidence that Twitter engagement can contribute to Continuous Professional Development? The evidence for this is based on the participants’ awareness of the hashtag, use of the hashtag, use of resources, and perception of how activity around the hashtag affects their professional activity.

3 Can the #mfltwitterati be described as a community of practice? This evaluation is based on whether the practices of the #mfltwitterati fit with the three descriptors defined by Wenger (1998): mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and shared repertoire.

Based on data collected through an online survey (n=116) and interviews (n=11), it describes how this collective of teachers use the hashtag and evaluates the impact of their Twitter network on their teaching practices. The results show that most users try the suggestions and ideas that they find on this network, which have a positive impact on their teaching. Finally, the paper assesses whether the hashtag users can be described as a community of practice.