Tweeting Up a Special Issue

Fresh from a synchronous tweet-up with authors interested in contributing to the upcoming Twitter in Education Special Issue of ELDM I’m reflecting on how the issue is shaping up.

Good chat this morning! Well, it was morning NZ time. It was evening in the UK for Sue and afternoon in NY for Jeffrey and in Florida for Simon.  A pleasure to be joined by authors from three different countries at this stage. We hoped the tweetchat would be an opportunity to connect in real time and toss a few ideas around, encouraging authors to proceed with their contributions to the journal and addressing any questions the writers may have at this stage. I expect it is also useful for prospective authors to see who else is writing for the special issue and what the topics are likely to be.

At this stage, authors have offered a wide variety of topics and they touched base within and outside of Twitter. We’ve kept a spreadsheet to track interest. Today’s Tweet-up involved 7 contributors, and suggested that there is active interest in areas such as: Using twitter for PhD thinking;  and Twitter with tertiary students – sharing literacy news and cultivating student-lecturer partnerships in learning. We all got excited about the prospect of revisioning lurking in Twitter as a more constructive practice. 'Lurking' might be frowned on, but it can also be about standing by and observing, akin to learning through listening and positive silent engagement (Sue Beckingham). I'm also intrigued by hashtag agency (Jeffrey Keefer). These indicate an exciting array of topics.

We are encouraged that the contributors are taking diverse angles, involving different participants in research, examining complex social and psychological phenomena, as well as pedagogies through twitter. In some cases, the authors are well underway with writing, shaping their articles. In others, the article will be a chance to turn conference presentations into peer reviewed outputs in a quality Sage journal.

For some, the research is in early stages - starting or generating data. There are also authors who are still thinking about how they might contribute. The good news is we deliberately made the timeline generous for this special issue. We understand and respect the need to take time to craft creative work. That is why the deadline is 26 Feb 2016. We do of course welcome early submission and can organise review in a timely manner.

In the meantime, we would like to nurture and encourage authors, to act as sounding boards for ideas in the formative stages, and to help in any way we can. Our aim is to attract a wide range of high quality submissions, and we are assured that if this special issue becomes too large, there is an opportunity to carry submissions to a further issue. From this point, we encourage all authors to keep in touch – if you would like to talk – skype, appear.in, email or f2f, please get in touch. We are happy to explore writing possibilities with you.

Let’s have another tweet up next month. And for those based locally in Hamilton, New Zealand, there is a conferencing opportunity at the 9 September elearning brown bag lunch.  Hope to see some of you there!

Sincere thanks to the participants at today’s tweet-up, a pleasure to virtually meet and chat with you all.

Storify