The Collapse of Teacher Twitter by the Numbers
Last year I constructed lists of thousands of science teachers, math teachers, education technologists, and administrators on Twitter using supervised machine learning. (a/k/a Coding a bunch of accounts by hand and then telling the machine to go nuts and get me more.) It’s from that data set that I’m drawing this graph showing a 20-50% decline in teachers who sent a tweet in May 2022 compared to May 2023.
I try not to be overly sentimental about social media but I am very curious about something here. For roughly ten years, Twitter was a locus of teacher creativity that produced, among many other things:
Twitter was where lots of my own favorite work—like Three Act Math and Graphing Stories—found collaborators and then took flight. The authoring team of the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum was a gallery of the #mbtos most wanted. Most of the teachers and coaches we first hired at Desmos Classroom first knew one another from Twitter.
I believe that teacher creativity, like all energy, is conserved—transformed and transferred but not destroyed. That energy isn’t easily found on Twitter any longer, though, so where is it? I don’t doubt that platforms like Tiktok are where you’ll find lots of teacher eyeballs but I haven’t seen anything there like the teacher creativity of Twitter c. 2008-2018.
Possibilities:
Macro-forces (e.g. pandemic, politicization, etc) have transferred that creative energy into tasks like just getting by.
Generational changes have transferred that creative energy into kids and mortgages.
Capitalism has transferred that creative energy into corporate interests, including Illustrative Mathematics, Pear Deck, and (ahem) Amplify.
The possibility that interests me most, however, is that the creative energy still exists, and maybe even exists in abundance, and that it is right now trying to find expression in a forum that doesn’t yet exist. How will the next generation of teachers use the internet to grow and create together?
As Twitter spirals deeper into a cesspool I don't believe most educators want to be associated with the place anymore. Personally, I still have my account, I still post every so often, but only to complain to big companies who don't seem to listen to any other form of communication.
I miss the prior era of the internet, where you found a forum that was specific to an interest. On social media it so often feels like you have to try to represent your entire persona rather than simply engage with the discussions that interest you. I post something about how slope is going and right underneath it is someone going "Why is everyone silent about the atrocities in _______" or "my nephew lost his job and needs $25000 for surgery" and it just feels strange to keep talking about slope.
I am on a couple of slacks and discords for specific interests (NBA basketball, politics) and those are much, much healthier places for the sort of creativity and dialogue that you and I pine for. I hope we can get back to something like that.