Social Media and Social Capital

 This week, I read the article "What do teachers share within Socialized Knowledge Communities: a case of Pinterest" by Sihua Hu et al. First, I was surprised by the amount of research in Pinterest in relation to teacher communities. This article was first published in 2018, and since then, MDR posted in 2019 that Instagram overtook Pinterest as number 2 for teachers. While I no longer teach, I was involved with "Teacher Instagram" during that time. 

The interesting part of this article to me was in discussion of Social Capital. This immediately brought to mind the different kinds of influencers prevalent in today's social media space. Teachers who are able to gain this social capital on different platforms often leverage it to make money through various avenues. (Note: there is nothing inherently wrong with this phenomena; it is merely an observation.) Through the article, it also discusses policy changes and professional communities. To my knowledge, there may be small threads of these occurrences throughout different platforms, but not to the degree that other communities work together online. For me, it also raises the question of is there an ethical obligation to teachers with large platforms to work harder for policy change, or to remain neutral due to their influential status? When influential teachers like these are able to make a lucrative income from other avenues besides teaching, are they still able to relate to peers who do not? 

Reference: https://mdreducation.com/2019/04/16/teachers-love-instagram-survey/ 

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