Expertise, Knowledge, and Resilience in #AcademicTwitter: Enacting Resilience-Craft in a Community of Practice

Abstract

Online communities of practice are a useful professional development space, where members can exchange information, aggregate expertise, and find support. These communities have grown in popularity within higher education—especially on social networking sites like Twitter. Although popular within academe, less is known about how specific online communities of practice respond and adapt during times of crisis (e.g., building capacity for resilience). We examined 22,078 tweets from #AcademicTwitter during the first two months of the Covid-19 pandemic, which impacted higher education institutions greatly, to explore how #AcademicTwitter enacted resilience during this time. Using text mining and semantic network analysis, we highlight three specific communicative processes that constitute resilience through a form of resilience labor that we conceptualize as “resilience craft.” Our findings provide theoretical significance by showing how resilience craft can extend theorizing around both communities of practice and the communicative theory of resilience through a new form of resilience labor. We offer pragmatic implications given our findings that address how universities and colleges can act resiliently in the face of uncertainty.

Realizing potential: a real option perspective on communities of practice in organizational transformation

“…Similarly, when Communities of Practice (CoPs) reach maturity, it becomes incumbent upon these leaders to extend the learned methodologies or insights from CoPs across the organization. The responsibility of disseminating the accumulated value from CoPs largely lies with the executives, as CoP members tend to concentrate on the community's internal functioning (Eddington & Jarvis, 2022;Roberts, 2006). Ineffective dissemination of the value derived from CoPs by an executive result in not fully leveraging their potential.…”

Editorial: Networks and Organizing Processes in Online Social Media

“…The next two articles show examples of utilizing trace data present in online communities. Eddington and Jarvis (2022) consider a hashtagged space, #AcademicTwitter, as an online community of practice which helped enact resilience labor. By examining frequently mentioned themes in the semantic network of tweets, the authors observe how college instructors responded and adapted to the Covid-19 pandemic.…”