Twitter Germany Project

About the Twitter Germany Project

Twitter Germany is a project initiated at the University of Tübingen, Germany. The project aims to map the entire German-speaking educational Twittersphere using advanced analytical techniques. Through educational data science methods, we aim to investigate this new form of informal learning and professional development for educational stakeholders. This may include studies that examine collaboration and resource sharing patterns, implementations and experiences of educational reforms, and the challenges associated with the COVID-19 induced shift toward emergency distance education, among others.

Personnel and Collaborations @ Tübingen and Beyond

Tübingen: Christian Fischer, Jan-Phillipp Burde, Walther Paravicini, Tim Fütterer, Fitore Morina, Lennart Klein, Johanna Grad, Eva Schmidhuber

National Collaborators: Martin Rehm (University of Regensburg)

International Collaborators: Jeffrey Carpenter (Elon University), Joshua Rosenberg (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Conrad Borchers (Carnegie Mellon University)

Funded Grants

Twitter als informelle Fortbildung für Lehrkräfte: Soziale Netzwerke und Lehrerbildung in Deutschland [Twitter as informal teacher professional development: Social networks and teacher education in Germany], Program for the Promotion of Junior Researchers, University of Tübingen, Germany [€14,225; Grant awarded to PI Fischer]

Scientific Accuracy of Mathematics and Physics Content in Teacher Communities on Twitter, Seed Funding, LEAD Graduate School and Research Network, University of Tübingen, Germany [€4,450; Grant awarded to PI Fischer and Co-PIs Burde, Paravicini]

Selected Publications and presentations (as of October 22)

Fischer, C., Morina, F., Borchers, C., Klein, L., & Eich, M. (2022, April). Informal Professional Development in Online Communities of Practice at Scale: Mapping Nationwide Educational Twitterspheres. Paper presented at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, CA.

Fütterer, T., Hoch, E., Stürmer, K., Lachner, A., Fischer, C., & Scheiter, K. (2021). Was bewegt Lehrpersonen während der Schulschließungen? – Eine Analyse der Kommunikation im Twitter-Lehrerzimmer über Chancen und Herausforderungen digitalen Unterrichts. [Concerns of Teachers During School Closings: Analyzing Communication in the Twitter-Lehrerzimmer Regarding Opportunities and Challenges of Digital Teaching]. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 24, 443–477. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11618-021-01013-8

Data and Code Availability

GitHub link: https://github.com/twitter-tuebingen/twde-dataset (Project will be publicly available in early 2023.)

Notably, the data set used for all analyses replaced all potentially sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) such as names, email addresses, and telephone numbers, among others with newly generated data strings to protect the anonymity of users. All raw data has been deleted. Similarly, analyses only take place on aggregate levels. Also, tweets will not be cited to further protect the users.

This project was evaluated and approved by the Ethics Committee at the University of Tübingen (#A2.5.4-140neu_ns) and the ZENDAS (Zentrale Datenschutzstelle der baden-württembergischen Universitäten; #17805).