Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Teachers College Educational ...

#phdchat: a community of practice on twitter
sava saheli singh,
NYU, 82 Washington Square East, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10003,
Email: sava@nyu.edu
Abstract: Twitter is often considered a place for frivolous conversations and people
talking about what they’re eating. Not a lot of people see it as the setting for building
robust and engaging Communities of Practice (CoP). #phdchat is one such community of
PhD students who find solace in each others’ company and support – something they
don’t always get in their physical settings. Gathering around the hashtag, this community
“meets” online on Twitter every week for discussions about the practicalities of being an
academic, challenges with emotional and mental well-being, and also to share useful
resources. This presentation provides a comparison and contrast of #phdchat as a CoP,
with a discussion on a methodology for examining such a community.
“On the web” has increasingly become where people go to hang out, learn, consume, and connect. Digital
and social media tools have changed the way we interact with the world, allowing communities to find
each other through shared interests and a need to connect.
Online communities have existed since the internet has and have taken many forms – from usenet
groups, forums, email newsgroups, and IRC to today’s social network sites like Facebook, Tumblr, and
Twitter. These are examples of what Howard Rheingold (1993) calls “virtual communities”, which exist
beyond location and time.
Communities that gather around a shared interest or practice, form Communities of Practice (CoPs)
(Lave & Wenger, 1991). The web provides new ways for these communities to come together through
online mediated environments, beyond geographical and physical constraints.
Even though Twitter is sometimes dismissed as a tool that encourages frivolous conversations rather
than meaningful interaction, there are robust communities who use it on a daily basis to connect,
collaborate, and commiserate. Twitter is used for everything from a marketing tool and a news outlet to an
educational tool used in classrooms and to connect educational communities beyond the classroom.
In many advanced degree programs, students live in a vacuum. They have their smaller communities
consisting of advisors and cohort members, but there is often a lack of extended input from their larger
professional community. PhD students have a unique academic journey and often find themselves
isolated from friends and family, with little in the way of support and encouragement. This isolation can
also give rise to more serious issues like lack of motivation, self-doubt, impostor syndrome, and
depression. Surprisingly, despite constraints, Twitter affords a way for PhD students to find a community
that understands and relates to their experiences.
Communities on twitter often identify themselves or gather around “hashtags” – a user-created way in
which to tag or contextualize tweets in order to follow, archive, or provide commentary. This paper
focuses on a particular CoP: PhD students, who gather around the hashtag #phdchat.
The #phdchat community conducts a weekly “online meeting” on Twitter around the hashtag #phdchat
during which they discuss a pre-decided topic that the community voted on. They share experiences, tips,
advice – the kind of knowledge-sharing rarely possible within the small cohorts of PhD programs. And the
community extends beyond just this time frame – using the #phdchat hashtag allows members to notice
and respond because the hashtag identifies you as part of that community.
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