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BackgroundMarketing and use of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) and other electronic nicotine delivery devices have increased exponentially in recent years fueled, in part, by marketing and word-of-mouth communications via social media platforms, such as Twitter.ObjectiveThis study examines Twitter posts about e-cigarettes between 2008 and 2013 to gain insights into (1) marketing trends for selling and promoting e-cigarettes and (2) locations where people use e-cigarettes.MethodsWe used keywords to gather tweets about e-cigarettes between July 1, 2008 and February 28, 2013. A randomly selected subset of tweets was manually coded as advertising (eg, marketing, advertising, sales, promotion) or nonadvertising (eg, individual users, consumers), and classification algorithms were trained to code the remaining data into these 2 categories. A combination of manual coding and natural language processing methods was used to indicate locations where people used e-cigarettes. Additional metadata were used to generate insights about users who tweeted most frequently about e-cigarettes.ResultsWe identified approximately 1.7 million tweets about e-cigarettes between 2008 and 2013, with the majority of these tweets being advertising (93.43%, 1,559,508/1,669,123). Tweets about e-cigarettes increased more than tenfold between 2009 and 2010, suggesting a rapid increase in the popularity of e-cigarettes and marketing efforts. The Twitter handles tweeting most frequently about e-cigarettes were a mixture of e-cigarette brands, affiliate marketers, and resellers of e-cigarette products. Of the 471 e-cigarette tweets mentioning a specific place, most mentioned e-cigarette use in class (39.1%, 184/471) followed by home/room/bed (12.5%, 59/471), school (12.1%, 57/471), in public (8.7%, 41/471), the bathroom (5.7%, 27/471), and at work (4.5%, 21/471).ConclusionsTwitter is being used to promote e-cigarettes by different types of entities and the online marketplace is more diverse than offline product offerings and advertising strategies. E-cigarettes are also being used in public places, such as schools, underscoring the need for education and enforcement of policies banning e-cigarette use in public places. Twitter data can provide new insights on e-cigarettes to help inform future research, regulations, surveillance, and enforcement efforts.

In order that teacher education programs can act as significant scaffolds in supporting new teachers to become informed, creative and innovative members of a highly complex and valuable profession, we need to re-imagine ways in which teacher education programs operate. We need to re-imagine how courses are conceptualized and connected, how learning is shared and how knowledge, not just “professional”, but embedded knowledge in authentic contexts of teaching and learning is understood, shaped and re-applied. Drawing on our study of a locally developed program in secondary teacher education called Transformative University of Victoria (TRUVIC), we offer a relational approach to knowing as an alternative to more mechanistic explanations that limit teacher growth and development. To ground our interpretation, we draw on complexity theory as a theory of change and emergence that supports learning as distributed, relational, adaptive and emerging.

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This health issue is serious. How are men socialized to believe or view health in ways that are detrimental to their health? Are they able to become aware of the choices they have in how they view health? Family, school, community, and media play major roles in directing males to behave and believe certain things about physically healthy lifestyles. It is our belief that these influential forces set and enforce certain gender roles and expectations that a male needs to meet to be accepted. The researchers understand a physically healthy lifestyle as a way of being physically active, eating a nutritionally balanced diet, and engaging appropriately with others and the environment. The researchers propose that this "maleness" socialization limits males in how they make healthy lifestyle choices and how they understand the notion of being physically healthy.The media's portrayal of men within a hegemonic system is a pervasive influence on peoples' understanding of a healthy lifestyle. To deconstruct A ccording to the Toronto Men's Health Network (TMHN), 1 There is an ongoing, increasing and mostly silent crisis in the health and well-being of men and boys. Due to a lack of awareness, poor health education, and culturally conditioned behavior patterns in their work and personal lives, the health and well-being of men and boys has been steadily deteriorating. In Canada and in several other countries, men and boys experience significantly higher rates of addiction, violence, crime, accident and premature death in comparison to their female counterparts. As well, men show significantly higher rates of death from cancer, heart disease, homicide and suicide. (TMHN, 2005) This study examines how 4 men from the same family, representing different generations, construct health from their perceptions of professional athletes. Many men are socialized and participate in sport discourses that promote certain truths about being a man that often have detrimental effects to their health. The capacity of research to inform men's construction of health is limited. In an attempt to engage male participants within the research process and cause a form of catalytic validity, transcripts from interviews with the men were analyzed, and thematic findings were represented in a poetic form and shared with the participants for discussion and refinement. The findings revealed how the male participants reiterated messages that the media promotes, such as the importance of physical and mental strength for a man. More significantly, the men became aware that they assumed a narrow definition of health portrayed by professional athletics that perpetuated a hegemonic masculinity. Reflections on changes in the men's lifestyle choices after engaging in the research process are offered in the conclusion.