This scenario occurs multiple times a week online as Education Twitter Chats. The most popular format for participating on these fora is the EdChat model.

 

EdChat was started in 2009 when Shelly Terrell, Tom Whitby and Steven Anderson saw the need among educators to discuss educational issues, share resources and provide support to each other as a community of learners. Every Monday, teachers meet on Twitter using the hashtag #EdChat to vote on two discussion topics. The top voted discussion takes place at Tuesday at 7:00 pm EDT, and second place topic on the same day at noon.

 

EdChat participation has been growing in participation every year as educators recognize the enormous learning potential that the environment offers. It has also branched-out into regular standing topics that are discipline and topic specific every week. A list of these EdChats is updated regularly by ‘Cybraryman’ Jerry Blumengarten and listed below:

 

https://sites.google.com/a/g.coppellisd.com/twitter1/-edchat-calendar

 

In a 2010 Huffington Post article entitled, The Remarkable Power of Twitter: A Water Cooler for the 21st Century, Jeff Goldstein, Director of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education expressed the value that he sees in EdChats:

 

The most remarkable experience I have on Twitter, and it's right up there with the very best learning experiences I've ever had over my lifetime as an educator, an astrophysicist, and a learner, is #EdChats.  Every Tuesday night at 7:00 pm Eastern Time, I join hundreds of educators from across the planet that get comfortable in front of their computers--a very local and personal experience--and have a global, free-for-all conversation about education. The operation of Twitter as the vehicle for communication quickly recedes into the background, and you enter into a world of rapid-paced vibrant conversations with folks as committed as you to sharing important ideas. You leave with new thoughts, new directions, a reinvigorated sense that the issues of importance to you are also important to others--providing a common bond, and you embrace friends you've never met but that you deeply understand.

Educational Twitter Chats represent a situated learning experience for educators by mirroring the conference environment while at the same time creating a new collaborative space to interact and learn from each other. They also leverage distributed cognition through the variety of embedded knowledge accessible in the social setting, including: the individual, groups, experts, computers devices and information available on the Internet.