Email: sarah.hewitt@soton.ac.uk
Address: B32, East Highfield Campus, University Road, SO17 1BJ (View in Google Maps)
After 11 years teaching English and Media in a big secondary school (including a sixth form) I decided to take a break and do something completely different. I completed the Web Science MOOC on Futurelearn, and from there completed a Masters and a PhD here at the the University of Southampton.
I'm now a Teaching Fellow here, based in the research group WAIS (Web and Internet Science).
There is plenty of research around Education and students; how students learn (in different key stages), online and blended learning, assessment etc. What is lacking is a focus on teachers: what they say, where they say it, the communities they form, the impact of online learning on their teaching practice; and how the Web has facilitated this.
My first major piece of research focused on how teachers use blogs: what they write, whether this has changed over time, and whether it's possible to see the impact of Education policy in the Edu-blogosphere. However, there is much useful conversation also happening on Twitter. Can these be linked? Can we add useful data, such as blog titles and tags to improve topic modelling, or classifier models? Couold we build a knowledge graph and create something that would be useful to the teaching community?