If you think about your daily life, it probably won’t take you long to see yourself as a connected individual. Communities don’t happen only online; maybe you play the ukelele and meet your fellow musicians weekly? maybe it is your local allotment, a book club, hill walking on Sundays? What jells people together varies immensely and as social creatures we drift towards those with similar interests. At work, we function much in the same way.
One such community is the Modern Foreign Languages Twitterati. Founder Joe Dale, in his blog post Have you heard of the MFL Twitterati? describes it as “a dynamic grassroots group of language teachers, consultants and associations from the UK who are passionate about language learning and love sharing their expertise with like-minded colleagues around the globe.”
You don’t need to be a Twitter enthusiast to do the following activity: simply enter “#mfltwitterati” in your browser or, if languages is not a subject of interest to you, try any other hashtag, for example: #edtech, #edchat, #flipclass, #openscience, #highered, #BYOD, etc. What are people doing? What is the purpose of their tweets? Post your comments in the forum below.