AAPT Summer meeting twitter analytics #aaptsm14

The Summer meeting of AAPT 2014 has come and gone.  It was fantastic to get to engage with so many incredible teachers, to hear what they are doing in their classrooms, to catch up with old friends, and make some new ones.

The use of twitter at the AAPT conferences has grown over the past few years. Rhett had a post at the end of the 2013 Winter meeting in New Orleans which showed only 116 tweets using the conference hashtag.

This past meeting, there were over 1500 uses of the conference hashtag (#aaptsm14) according to Tweetarchivist. Using the tools from Tweetarchivist and checking some other analytics, I’m guessing that there were at least 42 users who used the conference hashtag to post to twitter not counting users who retweeted a post containing the hashtag.

75% of the tweets came from the top 25 users.  Who was the most prolific tweeter?  @LCTTA had 202 tweets (representing just over 13% of all tweets), compared to AAPT’s official account, which had a respectable 145 tweets (9.6%). Third place went to @rutherfordcasey with 97 tweets (6.4%).  The top 25 users are displayed below. There were a LOT of great tweets from many attendees (and many who were following from home). Check out some of these physics teachers and consider following them!

I made a word cloud of the most popular words used. By far the most popular word was “students” if I counted the twitter abbreviation “Ss”. Also “learning” was slightly more popular than “teaching” 

What about the use of twitter through the week? The amount of tweets during the day took a dip in the middle of the conference, then were strong on the last day:

Screenshot from Tweetarchivist

The most popular phone used to tweet was the iPhone (no idea what model). I’d love to give props to the attendees who were using either a Blackberry (2 tweets posted) or Windows Phone (1 tweet posted) but I have no idea which user was on that one.  The breakdown of clients is shown below. I combined the  iPad and iPhone results, although the iPhone posts dominated.
Breakdown of twitter clients used:

iOS (all clients)	610
Tweetdeck	259
Android (all clients)	227
Web interface	152
Hootsuite	114
Other	148

Finally, for fun, I have the top mentions of users as well as the other popular hashtags used in posts also tagged with #aaptsm14 - The top users mentioned were @AAPTHQ with 118 mentions.  This makes sense, as there were many people tweeting questions at AAPT.  The next user with the most mentions was @rutherfordcasey, who was organizing many of the meet-ups as well as tweeting about great sessions he was in.  The popular hashtags used included #perc2014 and #modphys.


Top users by posts they made:

Top Users	COUNT
LCTTA	202
AAPTHQ	145
rutherfordcasey	97
SciEdHenry	92
drmagoo	90
eigenadam	77
TRegPhysics	57
achmorrison	55
dyanlj	39
fnoschese	37
SteveMaier_	30
distractons	26
MartaStoeckel	26
QuantumTweep	21
UniverseAndMore	20
SJDJ	19
OpenStax	18
MsPoodry	17
Cabertram92	16
ng_Holmes	16
arundquist	16
rjallain	15
danny_doucette	15
astronomatty	14
MnSTA1	13

Mentions of users in posts:

Top Users	COUNT
@AAPTHQ	118
@rutherfordcasey	114
@EEtkina	65
@LCTTA	58
@SciEdHenry	54
@achmorrison	52
@eigenadam	43
@bohacekp	37
@TRegPhysics	33
@MartaStoeckel	31
@drmagoo	30
@dyanlj	28
@kellyoshea	22
@UniverseAndMore	22
@arundquist	21
@distractons	18
@MsPoodry	17
@chrisgoedde	17
@leetramp	17
@ng_Holmes	17
@MrBWysocki	17
@UMNews	16
@jossives	16
@sciencegeekgirl	13
@phyzman	13

Popular hashtags used along with #aaptsm14

Hashtags	COUNT
#perc2014	38
#modphys	34
#physicsed	31
#ngss	15
#newbies	11
#scavengerhunt	11
#scied	10
#msum	8
#physics	6
#tweetup	6
#directmeasurementphysicsvideos	5
#shameless	5
#minneapolis	4
#dmvideo	4
#perc14	3
#gamedev	3
#dbir	3
#edcampmsmn	3
#umn	3
#arduino	3
#womeninstem	3
#math	3
#scaleup	3
#edtech	3
#starwars	3

Words matter (was What does "brick and mortar" make you think of?)

(Note: I posted a version of this originally on July 31, 2014. It was accidentally deleted, and I was unable to recover the original post. I rewrote the missing parts and added an epilogue at the end.)

The PERC conference kicked off with an interesting talk by Mike Dubson from CU Boulder. There is a great summary of the talk by Stephanie Chasteen over at her blog. The talk was about comparing a traditional large lecture-hall physics class to a MOOC of identical content.

I was struck, however, by the repeated use of the term "brick and mortar” to refer to the face-to-face course. To me, the terminology immediately invoked a business metaphor, with the student as a customer and the professor as a service provider.  I asked the presenter if that was an intentional choice of words, but I don't believe that my question was understood before he chose to move on. (Incidentally, I specifically remembered him using the word "customer" to refer to a student enrolled in the MOOC, but he claimed he did not use that word.)

The use of "brick and mortar" and "customer" to refer to a learning environment reminded me of the advertisement for a faculty position at a college that demanded the candidate be able to provide excellent customer service. David Perry wrote a series of posts on that which you can read about on his blog.

My take-away from Perry's articles was that the words we choose to use have an impact on how we act. If we believe education is more than a business transaction, then we must not use words which make it easier for administrators, students, other faculty, parents and the public to expect that sort of relationship with us.

Prof. Dubson had earlier in his talk stated his belief that education is the process by which our collective knowledge and understanding is passed down from generation to generation. At the end of his talk he concluded by telling us about the elementary school teacher who inspired in him a love for reading. He said that those types of teachers cannot be automated or replaced by a computer. His passionate love for great education was clear.

If the type of teacher that drives great education cannot be automated, then it certainly can't be reduced to a simple transactional relationship that words such as "brick and mortar" or "customer" cue us to think. Nor can the responsibility of passing down the world’s collective knowledge, understanding and culture be simply bought like a box tissues with a click of a button or a swipe of a credit card.

Words matter. We need to be intentional about using them.

---

Epilogue 

I was privileged to be able to co-host a discussion session at PERC which was about how the physics education and physics education research community should be thinking about implementing what we called in the abstract “Competency-Based Assessment” but which goes by many names. I was honored that Eugenia Etkina (and so many other people!!) showed up for this discussion. 

After listing many of the names by which the assessment strategy is called, I had intended to switch to the more familiar “Standards Based Grading” (SBG) name for our session. Prof. Etkina raised her hand and pointed out how we know that grades and grading causes stress for our students and is not at all what we want to emphasize. She pointed out that the standards are measured by assessments. 

I saw immediately the parallel between what she was pointing out to me and what I had been asking the speaker on the day before. Words matter. Even if I don’t intend to use the term “standards based grading” with my students it will better form our thinking if we remind ourselves that we are intentionally taking the emphasis off of grading. In our session we immediately switched to using the term “Standards Based Assessment and Reporting” (SBAR) which I intend to use exclusively going forward.

Words matter. Changing our use of words can be done; we just have to be intentional about it.