Educator Professional Conversations via Twitter Chat: Speech Acts and Intentions in #PDBookClub

#PDBookChat was an affinity space of educators who read a professional book together and reflected on their learning through blogs, Twitter, and Google+. The book study culminated with an hour-long synchronous Twitter chat. Using Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (Herring, 2001) and speech act theory (Searle, 1976) this paper focused on the Twitter chat to examine the discussion among the participants, the specific ways in which they connected their responses to each other and the content of the professional book they read, and provided an analysis of the key themes of the chat. This research provides evidence of how educators use Twitter to seek advice, share practices, and gain emotional support. In understanding how Twitter chats work to support professional learning, schools and educators can better leverage this free, easily accessible medium for professional development

Finding the Connectors and Catalysts: A Book Review of The Networked Teacher: How New Teachers Build Social Networks for Professional Support by Kira J. Baker-Doyle

Kira J. Baker-Doyle opens an important conversation about the support new teachers need to thrive in their first years of teaching with her book The Networked Teacher: How New Teachers Build Social Networks for Professional Support. Few would argue that the first years of teaching are the most stressful, with statistics indicate that about 50% of new teachers leave the profession within the first five years (Smith & Ingersoll, 2004). Some schools and districts provide mentoring programs or new teacher professional development, but Baker-Doyle argues that these traditional programs fail to support new teachers, and especially new teachers of the millennial generation (people who were children between 1990-2000). Traditional support programs tend to re-enforce teacher isolation and the assigned, inflexible curriculum and authoritative policies of the school. Taking a reformed perspective, Baker-Doyle argues that teachers\u27 work is social and their praxis evolves through interaction with their colleagues and when teachers\u27 own questions and professional agency are valued

Globally consistent response of plant microbiome diversity across hosts and continents to soil nutrients and herbivores

All multicellular organisms host a diverse microbiome composed of microbial pathogens, mutualists, and commensals, and changes in microbiome diversity or composition can alter host fitness and function. Nonetheless, we lack a general understanding of the drivers of microbiome diversity, in part because it is regulated by concurrent processes spanning scales from global to local. Global-scale environmental gradients can determine variation in microbiome diversity among sites, however an individual host’s microbiome also may reflect its local micro-environment. We fill this knowledge gap by experimentally manipulating two potential mediators of plant microbiome diversity (soil nutrient supply and herbivore density) at 23 grassland sites spanning global-scale gradients in soil nutrients, climate, and plant biomass. Here we show that leaf-scale microbiome diversity in unmanipulated plots depended on the total microbiome diversity at each site, which was highest at sites with high soil nutrients and plant biomass. We also found that experimentally adding soil nutrients and excluding herbivores produced concordant results across sites, increasing microbiome diversity by increasing plant biomass, which created a shaded microclimate. This demonstration of consistent responses of microbiome diversity across a wide range of host species and environmental conditions suggests the possibility of a general, predictive understanding of microbiome diversity