Dan Meyer has proposed a new hashtag to use for posts aimed at our community of math educators. The hashtag he proposes is:
#iteachmath
It has many features that make it a very strong identifier. It is clear, direct and non-threatening to newcomers. It is also refreshing for veterans of teaching. In an age where we are not always getting the respect we deserve, declaring #iteachmath in such an open way gives me a surprising feeling of pride.
Dan’s reason for proposing a new hashtag is to provide a better experience for our members. He argues specifically that the #iteachmath hashtag allows an easier entry for newcomers because of its clarity and non-threatening nature. This will lead to more members who feel comfortable participating, he argues, and all members will benefit.
I like what Dan is trying to do and I like the hashtag. In fact, I like it a lot and agree we should use it for the reasons he puts forth. But I don’t think the hashtag, as is, is enough to make significant progress toward accomplishing the goals of a richer membership moving forward. The problem isn’t the quality of the hashtag, it’s the fact that it is a single hashtag. This is the main premise of this post:
The fact that we use a single hashtag to denote membership and to call upon eachother online is a structural flaw in our organization that systematically blocks people from connecting with each other.
Here’s why:
Scanning through a days worth of Tweets using our current #mtbos identifier reveals 3 things: 1) Despite the single hashtag, the topics are extremely wide ranging. In contrast, all of us who are perusing the posts have relatively specific interests. This makes scanning the list of posts unmotivating since most of the topics fall outside of our interest range. Less motivation leads to less people scanning posts, which means less posts get answered and less people get connected. 2) There are a lot of posts. Since there is only one hashtag, every post goes to the same place. Scanning through them all is impossible, let alone replying. Additionally, this, again, makes it psychologically unappealing to engage with the overwhelming stream of posts. 3) Because most of the posts are outside of our interest zone, and we don’t interact with most of them because of the shear number, the majority of posts are made by strangers. Engaging people you’ve never interacted with before is certainly necessary in order to grow, but people tend to avoid places where the ratio of stranger to friend is too high. In general, people prefer to spend most of their time interacting with people they already know.
Long story short, because of the single hashtag, the majority of people who post with it do not connect with anyone. The people who do connect through the hashtag are the people who are already established. People that already have friends with similar interests who use the hashtag. The result is a single-centered system with the established people at the center and the non-established people on the outskirts wishing more people would engage with them. Of course, some of the non-established get a reply here and there. It looks like this:
This has nothing to do with the will of the participants. The people on the outskirts want to be connected. The people in the middle want everyone to be connected. It is the structural result of the single hashtag system.
I am proposing a structured system of hashtags that will help us redraw our connections to be more like the picture below, which represents a much healthier community that helps people find and more quickly belong to subgroups of people who share their interests and needs.
This will be accomplished by creating a systematic set of self-organizing subgroups within the community that will allow for much more personalized participation.
The system’s basic hashtag is Dan’s excellent #iteachmath. All the other hashtags in the system are related to this hashtag. This is accomplished by using the abbreviation #itm (short for #iteachmath) as a prefix for other sub-hashtags, with suffixes added to the end to make the tag unique. As an example, the tag #itmCalc is the proposed subgroup name for people interesting in teaching calculus, #itmBUF is the proposed name for math educators in the Buffalo, NY area, and #itmEquity is the proposed subgroup name for math educators interested in student equity. The proposed sub-hashtags fall into 3 main categories:
course hashtags
geographic hashtags
community interest hashtags
Here is a description of each type and a list of the proposed sub-hashtags:
Course Hashtags
Course hashtags exist for people looking to connect and share resources with people who are teaching the same course as them. Here are the proposed course hashtags. More will need to be added.
- Kindergarten: #itmK
- 1st Grade: #itmG1
- 2nd Grade: #itmG2
- 3rd Grade: #itmG3
- 4th Grade: #itmG4
- 5th Grade: #itmG5
- Elementary School: #itmElem
- 6th Grade: #itmG6
- 7th Grade: #itmG7
- 8th Grade: #itmG8
- Middle School: #itmMS
- Algebra 1: #itmAlg1
- Geometry: #itmGeom
- Algebra 2: #itmAlg2
- PreCalc: #itmPreCalc
- Calculus 1: #itmCalc1
- High School: #itmHS
- Calculus 2: #itmCalc2
- Calculus 3: #itmCalc3
- Linear Algebra: #itmLinAlg
- Differential Equations: #itmDiffEQ
Geographic Hashtags
This is a set of subgroups I am really excited about. The thought of potentially being able to connect with more educators in my local area is wonderful. These hashtags can be used to announce local math news, to promote local math-related events, or to connect and collaborate with math people in your region. Like I said, exciting! Here are the proposed hashtags for many of the most populated cities in the United States. More will need to be added. The list entirely ignores other countries at the moment, but it would be easy to add cities using the system.
- Atlanta: #itmATL
- Seattle: #itmSEA
- St. Louis: #itmSTL
- Jacksonville: #itmJAX
- Miami: #itmMIA
- Philadelphia: #itmPHI
- Green Bay: #itmGRB
- Detroit: #itmDET
- Pittsburgh: #itmPIT
- Cleveland: #itmCLE
- Washington DC: #itmDC
- Boston: #itmBOS
- Phoenix: #itmPHX
- San Francisco: #itmSF
- San Diego: #itmSD
- Memphis: #itmMEM
- Orlando: #itmORL
- Albany: #itmALB
- Buffalo: #itmBUF
- Cincy: #itmCIN
- Columbus: #itmCOL
- Chattanooga: #itmCHA
- Indianapolis: #itmIND
- New York City: #itmNYC
- Los Angeles: #itmLA
- Chicago: #itmCHI
- Oakland: #itmOAK
- Minneapolis: #itmMPLS
- Denver: #itmDV
- Austin: #itmAUS
- Dallas: #itmDAL
- Houston: #itmHOU
- Nashville: #itmNVL
- Portland: #itmPD
- San Jose: #itmSJ
- San Antonio: #itmSA
- Fort Worth: #itmFW
- Charlotte: #itmCHA
- Kansas City: #itmKC
- Baltimore: #itmBALT
- New Orleans: #itmNO
- Milwaukee: #itmMILW
- Omaha: #itmOMA
- Albuquerque: #itmABQ
Community Interest Hashtags
These hashtags are too varied and too unpredictable to list, but they are vital. Things like standards based grading, #itmSBG, and student equity, #itmEquity, can be easily invented using the #itm prefix.
Discussion and Summary
A single hashtag system causes too many people to be left unconnected. Systematic use of sub-hashtags allows richer, more frequent interaction by allowing members to peruse and interact with distinct subgroups of people that are smaller in number and focused on similar interests. Imagine you are a 5th grade math teacher in Portland interested in Project Based Learning. With this new system of sub-groups, you could consistently follow and interact with #itmG5, #itmPD, and #itmPBL. You would still be operating within the larger #iteachmath community, but it would be a lot easier for you to become connected to people this way, and connection is what we’re all after.
Notice that this fits perfectly into Dan’s idea of using #iteachmath as an intuitive way for math educators to become introduced to the community so that they can find other, more relevant communities. Once you’re in with the basic #iteachmath hashtag, what’s more natural as your next step than saying “I teach math in Portland, to 5th graders using Project Based Learning”. Now, there’s a hashtag for that. Welcome to your new personalized community.
Afterthoughts
- It would be useful to have an official reference list for these hashtags. This blog post could be a starting point, but, given the flexible nature of the lists, an updatable version would be nice. I have started the process of learning how to create a Wikipedia page that could house the up-to-date information. I have never created a Wikipedia page before, so I don’t know how that will go. I would love to hear suggestions on this.
- One feature Dan describes as being a benefit of #iteachmath is the declarative nature of the phrase. I have seen at least one person argue that shortening the hashtag will lose its declarative nature as it becomes used commonly, especially if it is abbreviated to #itm. I agree with this a bit, but I believe it will always be able to be referenced as a declarative for the uninitiated, which will make the system make sense quickly. Imagine explaining the system to an uninitiated new member: “The main hashtag is #iteachmath. Just tag that on a tweet and it will be seen by the broad online math ed community. Sub-hashtags like #itmMS mean ‘I teach math in middle school’. Use that if you want to interact with other people who teach in middle school”. It’s very straightforward. Now, will hashtags like #itmMS just become the name of a sub-group and lose their declarative nature to the initiated? Sure. But they will remain very declarative when you need them to be, namely when initiating a new member to the group.
- Of course I realize that the “single-hashtag” idea is an oversimplification. We clearly use other hashtags. But I think the predominance of a single hashtag to represent the community has the effect I describe. What I’m proposing is different. It makes the hashtag world predictable, systematic, and held under one umbrella that anchors us squarely in the math education realm.
Intriguing. I need to think about this one some more, but as a teacher who promotes the MathTwitterBlogosphere to other teachers and tries to support them, I’ve definitely felt guilty about the fact that I don’t actually read the #mtbos tag myself, for all the reasons you describe, and therefore do not welcome newcomers through that. I also would love a better way to connect locally through Twitter.
One urgent (joking here, mostly) modification: no way would a Portland teacher (I am one and have lived here 21 years) expect “#itmPD”. It would absolutely be “itmPDX”. For some reason that’s never been entirely clear to me, Portlanders strongly identify with our airport code and have done so consistently for decades. We could let Portland, ME have #itmPD!
A more serious objection is that I think the organization you envision would rapidly break down with special cases. For instance, I might think of my local math community as Portland, or Oregon, or Portland and its suburbs (one big suburb is actually in Washington), or the Pacific Northwest. Would I be keeping track of all those tags? Well, maybe. Would I post to them all? Presumably not. Similar issues apply to content/course level.
It might still be a significant enough improvement to do, though. I’m going to see a bunch of networked-but-mostly-not-on-Twitter Oregon math teachers next week at a conference, so I think I’ll ask them.
Hi Julie. Thanks for your insights. I envision local chapters as being spearheaded by local leaders who will, in turn, adopt a particular local #itm hashtag. I, for one, plan to start my local #itmBUF chapter. Rochester is a city about an hour from Buffalo that is smaller. Should they follow #itmROCH or #itmBUF? I think it will depend on the strength and presence of a leader in Rochester. If someone takes the initiative to develop a strong local chapter in Rochester, more people in Rochester will likely follow the #itmROCH tag. If not, then it would still be beneficial for them to follow the #itmBUF tag since there may be information about conferences and opportunities that are certainly local enough.
This sounds like an excellent point and a great idea for a solution. At first blush, it feels like I will need a secret decoder ring to figure out which tags to use on a post, but I imagine that will sort itself out fairly quickly. My one concern with all of this is that we will wind up with half our characters going to tags as we transition about trying to include everyone’s ideas. If that eventually gives us a richer community, I imagine it will be an effort worth pursuing.
Hi Kathy. I certainly agree that there is a learning curve to the system, but, given the complexity of the system and the number of hashtags in it, I think the barrier to learning has been minimized. When selecting a hashtag, I consider four things:
1) How intuitive is it to a non-initiated person?
2) How easy is it to remember once someone knows what it means?
3) How many characters is it?
4) How well does it fit into a larger system of tags?
In this case, I think my proposed system does not do a good job with #1 above, but does a great job of #2, 3, and 4. Doing a good job with #1 requires a lot of characters, especially when you want a large system of tags. Large systems of tags require sets within sets, just like large numbers of files require storage in nested subfolders. Since each tag has to refer to at least two different sets, the character count required to do a good job with #1 is even higher. The straightforward, easy-to-remember nature of Dan’s #iteachmath hashtag makes the #itm prefix easy to remember once you know what it means while keeping the character count down.
I like your description of the way the conversation is had right now. I wonder if current things that have a lot of activity could be folded in.
Yeah. I’ve been considering this. Two that have been suggested as having a large following are #elemmathchat and #msmathchat, for instance. I think the specific course and grade level tags could be useful. I have started to try to use them. One thing that I have found is that it made me think more specifically about what I was posting. Before I post, I think, “What course would this fit in, specifically?” Sometimes I realize that my resource, problem or idea isn’t specific enough to be useful, so I sharpen it so that it does fit in the realm of a specific course. The course and grade level tags could serve to sharpen our posts to be more useful and specific.