Twitterotopia or Rise of the Tweacher

While studying for my professional doctorate in education, I found myself reading Michel Foucault’s Of Other Spaces, in which he presents what he calls ‘heterotopias’ – spaces that exist parallel to mainstream social spaces (Foucault , 1984). I couldn’t help but see in this description a framework for describing #EduTwitter, a space in which teachers (and teaching) are transformed. A heterotopia is ‘capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’ (Foucault, 1984, p.6). Heterotopias of time are capable of suspending snippets of history from different times together in one space, such as museums and cinemas.  Foucault could not have foreseen the coming of social media, but the image he presents of experience as a ‘network that connects points and intersects with its own skein’ (Foucault, 1984, p.1) seems ideally placed to describe the ways in which social media is connecting us and, as Rymarczuk explor