Part of my work is to discern the “influence” of educational media and technologies. As such, I was glad when I cam across an article by Jeffrey Carpenter et al. discussing the educational influencer. In their article (from their abstract), they describe how some educators use social medial platforms to affect other educator’s practices, philosophies, and professional identities. Interestingly, this is a very popular way of being for many teachers – being plugged into social media to learn the newest way of grading (or un-grading), classroom management, and fun teaching techniques. And yet, there seems to be little about academics (i.e. professors of education) are actively engaged in these discussions. In a different article, Maynard (2021) proposes that “even talent-limited academics can nevertheless leverage YouTube as a platform for further mobilizing their knowledge for public good” (p. 1).
So… given this challenge to engage educational discourse through the medium of social media, I have been co-creating YouTube videos with some research assistants about educational theories. In fact, I have written an article (2022), Co-creating educational YouTube videos as a Community of Inquiry, to share about this experience. Additionally, if you would like to view some of the videos, you can go to the VIDEOS tab and see what we have been doing.
In the future, I hope to have a mix of short introductory videos about major educational theories, as well as longer videos with detailed discussions. Perhaps you have educational content on social media? If so, I would love to hear from you as well.