Obstacles, Travails, and Barriers, Oh My! Educators’ Perspectives on Challenges in Professional Social Media Use
Abstract: Social media such as Twitter and Facebook have become venues for self-directed professional activity for some educators. Although these professional activities are generally voluntary in nature and thus must provide some benefits and/or gratification to participating educators, social media use for professional purposes is not without its drawbacks. In this paper, we present challenges described by a sample of educators who had actively used social media professionally for an extended period of time. We collected data from 48 educators via semi-structured individual and focus group interviews. We identified four general types of challenges experienced by the participants: intrapersonal, interpersonal, school community, and online educator community challenges. Finally, we discuss implications of these findings for educators, teacher educators, and education researchers.