Many thanks for your visit and comments on the ethnography. I found it fascinating to uncover the diverse layers of interaction and connection between the eltchat participants, not only on Twitter but also other sites online (and offline) – I look forward to eltchat symposium at IATEFL conference in Glasgow!

As to the new ways of presenting academic content, the msc encourages us to explore the possibilities technologies offer in that respect, something I’m really grateful for as it helps me think more creatively. I also like the fact how the whole process of writing (and reading) starts to liken that of designing. You can see more examples of such multimodal assignments in the course gallery: http://www.education.ed.ac.uk/e-learning/gallery.htm

Ania

Thank you for choosing #ELTchat for your study and for this very rich tapestry of viewpoints and angles into what we do every Wednesday!

On another level, it was really fascinating to see how academic work can be presented now – dissertation work in my time as a student was never presented in such an interesting way.

It was also great to see how your choices reflected the variety and diversity of the tools we use on #ELTchat to maintain a connected community of ELT practitioners who are keen on their professional development.

Thank you again.

Marisa Constantinides
#ELTchat Moderation
@Marisa_C on Twitter

Thanks again for a great ethnography : )

Just wanted to add my appreciation of your ethnography to the others. I have really enjoyed the variety of visual productions you used to represent this text based community! I wandered to what extent the synchronous nature of the chat created a more intense community presence – a buzz and whether and how this stimulated further interactions across the asynchronous media.

Fascinating – thanks

@Austin and Jeremy: I found that presence of other related sites interesting too. It’s like the Twitter chat is only the tip of the iceberg, growing into much greater network of professional and personal bonds (the petri dish?). It would be curious to study it in more detail and maybe map it out, as Jeremy suggests, to see the sheer scale and persistence of the phenomenon.

@ Grace and Daniel – I’ve always thought it myself that Twitter might be superficial and sometimes used to stroke one’s ego but there is a lot of giving in that community and it’s interesting to see how they refer to each other, using a term ‘family’ for example. I’m training some English teachers online now and two of them are #eltchatters – when they discovered that there was an immediate outburst of friendliness. Not sure if that’s related to them belonging to the community, but they seem to be more into sharing that the rest of the participants. One of them said ‘Sharing is caring’, which echoes what you, Danie,l said in your comment.

@Jen The prezi tree is a bit random in its selection of blogs and the leafy version is me going mad with a crayon – perhaps it’s me imagining the imagined community? my hunger after an ideal community? Jokes aside, I do think the trees represent the point and given more time and ability I would love to explore the connectivity in more detail as it’s the ‘background’ activity that actually foregrounds eltchat as a community (noticed by its members on a number of occasions). I think more exploration could uncover more tension as to the perceived/actual/imagined democracy. Thanks for the link to the article!

A wonderfully creative ethnography. I really like how you’ve put it all together. I had no idea that the ELT community was so vibrant. I’m not a great lover of Twitter, have similar views to Daniel, believing it to be ‘chaotic’ and ‘superficial’ as quoted above. But you’ve proven how well and to what extent it can be used.

Bassett, E. H., & O’Riordan, K. (2002). Ethics of Internet research: Contesting the human subjects research model. Ethics and Information Technology, 4(3), pp. 233–247.