The purpose of this study is to begin describing the variety of social spaces that have been created on Twitter to support teachers and to describe the specific ways in which they vary. In particular, I have focused on Regional Educational Twitter Hashtags (RETHs)—hashtags that group tweets related to education within particular geographic regions. These hashtags can be conceived of as spaces with community dimensions. If they are to benefit from social interaction on Twitter, teachers must be able to identify those spaces that may be valuable for them and to recognize the social dynamics and practices that exist within them; the community dimensions of these spaces may therefore help teachers describe and distinguish individual RETHs. Researchers of online communities have proposed a number of these dimensions, which can be grouped into three broad categories: communication, participants, and activity.This study can be described as a quantitative content analysis employing digital methods. I retrieved data associated with approximately 1.3 million tweets containing one of 62 RETHs from the Twitter API. I adapted the community dimensions identified in the literature—and related measures of social interaction on Twitter—into 20 measures that fell into the previously-identified categories of communication, participants, and activity. Then, to determine how RETH spaces differ from each other, I used principal components analysis (PCA) to reduce these twenty measures to four composite dimensions: one related to communication, one related to participants, and two related to activity. I then represented these four composite dimensions graphically, allowing me to look for patterns.The results of this study help describe the average RETH and highlight the ways in which these hashtag spaces differ from each other. An examination of the original 20 measures demonstrates that within the average RETH, retweeting and link sharing each constitute a substantial minority of activity while replying and quoting are practiced rarely. Furthermore, the average tweet contains multiple hashtags but fewer than one mention, and the average participant has substantial experience on Twitter but has contributed little to the RETH itself. However, numbers of posts and handles vary from hashtag to hashtag. The four composite dimensions lend additional insight into the differences between RETH spaces. The single communication dimension distinguishes RETHs where messages are more characterized by sharing from those where messages are less characterized by sharing. The single participant dimension distinguishes RETHs whose participants have more previous experience on Twitter from those whose participants have less previous experience. The two activity dimensions distinguish RETHs from more volume to less volume and from more connected to less connected. These results have both practical and theoretical implications. Because RETHs can be distinguished along four composite dimensions, each RETH may be similar to others in some ways while remaining distinct in others. Teachers may therefore find more value in some RETHs than in others; however, because RETHs are geographically-situated, this poses obstacles for teachers whose local RETH does not correspond to their needs. Furthermore, because a substantial proportion of RETH participants have long been active on Twitter, these spaces should make sure that they are welcoming to newcomers. In terms of theory, these results highlight the shortcomings of both the community of practice and affinity space frameworks and suggest that new framing is needed to fully appreciate this phenomenon.
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