AAPT Summer meeting 2015 twitter mini-analysis (#AAPTSM15)

I was not at the Summer meeting of AAPT which just wrapped up earlier this week. But, I have been following along with the meeting hashtag on twitter (#AAPTSM15) which was a great way to get a sense of what was going on in College Park, without actually being there.

I wanted to do some analysis of the tweeting, so I set up an IFTTT recipe to log all the tweets with the hashtag to a Google spreadsheet. Unfortunately, I didn’t set it up until some people were already flying out for the pre-meeting workshops and related meetings, and apparently my recipe got turned off right about the time the bridge session from AAPT to PERC was starting.  So, I don’t have a complete data set, but I have the majority of the tweets.

Here are some numbers:

249 unique accounts tweeted or retweeted with the #AAPTSM15 hashtag. Excluding users who only retweeted something leaves 118 unique accounts, up from 42 a year ago. Not all of them were at the meeting, and some of the retweets may have been from bots, but it’s still a far cry from the winter meeting in New Orleans a few years ago when I think it was just Heather Whitney, Rhett Allain, and myself who were tweeting.

Over 1500 tweets (including 640 retweets) were sent during the meeting.  I didn’t follow everyone who was tweeting, so I was grateful that so many were retweeting from their timeline.

What about the most prolific tweeters?  Here are the 25 users with the most #AAPTSM15 tweets:

@LCTTA	169
@AAPTHQ	155
@eigenadam	77
@MrLeNadj	55
@TRegPhysics	50
@chrisgoedde	45
@fnoschese	43
@WBrianLane	39
@nquarderer	30
@arundquist	26
@dyanlj	26
@Mr_Martenis	26
@UniverseAndMore	24
@rjallain	22
@kellyoshea	21
@watermanphysics	20
@BlackPhysicists	19
@csealfon	18
@KHSphysics	18
@ainissaramirez	17
@ng_Holmes	17
@bethaapt	16
@fpoodry	15
@SteveMaier_	15
@danny_doucette	14

Once again, the most tweets came from @LCTTA. Nice work, Joe! (Sorry for not linking the usernames to twitter.)

I thought my analysis of the tweets was going to be all about the numbers related to tweet activity. But what is really interesting to me are the themes that emerged (in my opinion) from the attendees who were tweeting.

Ideas which seemed to resonate with attendees, based on my reading of my own timeline included: how do we ensure diversity in the physics classroom, the role of physics education in society in general, how we choose the topics and activities to include in our classes, and how to improve assessment of student learning.  Here are some tweets which were some of the most favorited and retweeted of all which illustrate these themes:

Two most of the most retweeted tweets came from Frank Noschese. The first on the social value of learning physics, as raised by Eugenia Etkina:

"What can we do, when we teach physics, to make the world better? (It isn't the motion of objects on inclined planes.)" - @EEtkina #AAPTSM15

— Frank Noschese (@fnoschese) July 26, 2015

The second, on diversity issues in physics classrooms:

Why is student self-selection of groups bad? Self-selection reduces diversity and isolates women and under-represented people. #AAPTSM15

— Frank Noschese (@fnoschese) July 28, 2015

Taoufik Nadji (@MrLeNadj) got a lot of retweets from this image:

#AAPTSM15 Day 3 @AAPTHQ Today's #Coolisms included rocking @ainissaramirez. #physicsed #modphys #ptbos #iteachphysics pic.twitter.com/sWiUJL67M9

— Taoufik Nadji (@MrLeNadj) July 28, 2015

There was a demo which got several retweets:

How to lift a bucket of pennies with a fan...#EnergyConversion #aaptsm15 #ptra2015 @aapt_ptra 👌🏻💯😄 pic.twitter.com/dsDshs8Ld3

— Kennedale HS Physics (@KHSphysics) July 23, 2015

Joe Heafner had a comment about how topics are chosen in physics classes:

Rigid lists of topics to be “covered” must be abandoned and replaced with broader competencies. #AAPTSM15

— LCTTA (@LCTTA) July 27, 2015

Trevor Register had a couple of tweet garnering several retweets. The first was a comment again from Eugenia Etkina:

Allowing students to redo and improve their work WITHOUT PENALTY is vital for students success. - Etkina. +1 for #SBG. #AAPTSM15

— Trevor Register (@TRegPhysics) July 26, 2015

The second was related to the value of student designed or directed labs:

Sense-making is almost completely absent in cookbook labs vs student designed/directed ones. #AAPTSM15 pic.twitter.com/C1HMXFg7ig

— Trevor Register (@TRegPhysics) July 26, 2015

So while there was one popular tweet specifically about a neat demonstration, most of the engaging tweets were about big-picture ideas in physics education. This is really neat for me to see, because I have been thinking about many of these issues for a few years, and to be honest, sometimes it feels like no one else is with me. So I hope to have more to say regarding some of the above ideas in the near future.

Finally, the tweets I captured for analysis were only the ones using the meeting hashtag. There was a lot of discussion online between attendees and non-attendees which often did not include the hashtag. My analysis doesn’t capture that dynamic back-and-forth engagement between physics teachers. If you explore the hashtag, starting with the above tweets, you’ll see the discussions which went on, and are still going on.

If you’re not on twitter, there’s no better time than now to check it out.  See you at #AAPTWM16 - I’ll be attending as I did this one: on twitter.