Some time ago I was thinking about how Twitter’s character limitations for tweets imposed brevity and concision on tweet authors. Nonetheless, in spite of those restrictions, when you begin to disassemble a tweet, a rich and complex ensemble is revealed. More recently I’ve been revisiting those actors and trying to think about them in terms of what they ‘do’ when enacting different practices teachers associate with professional development. The thing which most struck me was that different actors play a more or less significant role depending on the practice in which they’re involved. For example, the ‘Follow’ button is clearly significant in the activity teachers call ‘connecting with others,’ but is (arguably) less important when ‘discussing issues.’ I then began to consider how it might be possible to map the significance of different tweet actors as participants in different professional development activities. These ponderings produced the following vis:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BvxDufSlPof/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
During the past few months, I’ve participated in a number of exchanges on Twitter that have been part of my research. Sometimes this has been no more than a couple of tweets back and forth with one other person. At other times it’s been a more extended discussion involving several people; multiple voices, multiple tweets. What I’ve struggled with over the past year or so, is finding a tool which will display the exchange in a way that simplifies reading the thread(s). If you’ve ever tried reading and making sense from a string of replies to a tweet, you’ll know how tricky this can sometimes be.
Marginal Notes 
