More than tools? Making sense of the ongoing digitizations of higher education

147

Reflecting on 50 years of educational technology research, a content and authorship analysis was conducted of 1777 research article titles and abstracts, published in the British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET) from 1970 to Issue 3, 2018. A textmining tool (Leximancer) was used to identify key concepts and themes emerging throughout each of the five decades, which were then compared to those found in a previous analysis of Computers & Education, as well as the most cited BJET publications in each decade. The framework of West and Rich (2012) was then used to provide guidance on BJET's rigour, impact and prestige. Common themes in BJET throughout the past 50 years have included the evolution of teaching and learning in distance education, the emergence of instructional design, misunderstanding between practitioners and learning designers, issues of pre and in-service teacher education and technology uptake by educators and students, including the confidence to do so, the technology skills of educators and students, as well as a lack of institutional support to provide space and time for training and integration to occur. The authorship analysis revealed an encouraging increase in international identity over time, with 60% of articles in BJET published by an author outside of the UK over the past 50 years, and 79% in the past decade. Despite this, contributions from South America, the Middle East and Africa are vastly underrepresented, and authors from these regions need further support from the field. Suggested future research areas include finding alternative models of educator professional development, further exploration of the role of theory and policy, as well as the rise of co-authorship and collaborative research. © 2018 British Educational Research AssociationRevisiting five decades of educational technology research 13Approaching this important milestone prompted the editorial team and the authors of this paper to consider the contribution that BJET has made to the field, but also to question the identity of the journal and in particular to ponder how "British" the British Journal of Educational Technology actually is. In a recent editorial (Hennessy, Girvan, Mavrikis, Price, & Winters, 2018), the editors Practitioner NotesWhat is already known about this topic• The British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET) is one of the most established and prestigious in the field, with its 50th anniversary this year. • An increasing number of bibliometric and content analyses of educational technology journals are being published, in order to gain an understanding of the history and development of the field, but research gaps exist in understanding author country of origin, gender and (academic) position. • The topics 'online learning' and 'learning environments' became widely published topics in BJET after 2008.posited that "BJET remains remarkably international despite its name" (p. 3), with UK contributions totalling 16% of articles in 2017, and the rest hailing from 19 different countries. Upon clos...

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Conclusion Recommendations and Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting five decades of educational technology research: A content and authorship analysis of the British Journal of Educational Technology

Bond¹,

Zawacki‐Richter²,

Nichols³

2018

147

“…Bigum, Johnson, and Bulfin () noted this positivity extended to educational technology scholarship: “The association of… technologies with improving things is a kind of default logic… the research literature associated with ed‐tech is made up of an almost unending number of studies that look for improvements in learning” (p. 5). In recent years, scholarship has shifted, seeing more scholars “expressing critical views of education and technology...challenging questions of the social, cultural, political and economic connotations of digital technology use in higher education” (Castañeda & Selwyn, ; Chapman & Greenhow, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social scholarship revisited: Changing scholarly practices in the age of social media

Greenhow¹,

Gleason²,

Willet³

2019

Christine Greenhow is an associate professor in Educational Psychology & Educational Technology, Michigan State University. She studies various forms of learning with social media, the design of social-mediated environments for learning and changes in scholarship practices with new media. (More information at: http://www.cgreenhow.org and @chrisgreenhow on Twitter). Benjamin Gleason is an assistant professor in the School of Education, Iowa State University. His research interests include teaching and learning through social media, focusing specifically on literacy practices, identity development, and civic engagement in social learning spaces. (More information at AbstractThis conceptual exploration revisits a key question from earlier work (Greenhow & Gleason, 2014): What is scholarship reconsidered in the age of social media? Social scholarship is a framework that expanded Boyers' (1990) conceptualization of scholarship to consider how social media affect discovery and research, teaching and learning, integration, and application. This paper critically reflects on how social scholarship continues to evolve in light of changing understandings in the field of educational technology and the role social media play in the academy. We provide recent examples of social scholarship such as altmetrics, interdisciplinary projects, crowdsourced educational technology syllabi and reconsideration of the needs of research participants. Moreover, we share concrete examples of how scholars might enact social scholarship, with what benefits and challenges, and surface new concerns regarding openness, equity, access, literacy, privacy and ethical considerations. Our paper concludes with recommendations for preparing scholars to enact social scholarship while mitigating the challenges it poses. practices, and in the institutional and societal contexts within which scholars work that warrant a closer, critical examination of this model today.

“…The key challenges in the area of e‐learning are well documented in the literature: existing work tends to be atheoretical and lacks explicit and detailed consideration of theories of learning generally (Castañeda & Selwyn, ; Mayer, ). Similar criticism applies at the level of pedagogy (Bartolomé, Castañeda, & Adell, ).…”

Section: Current Challenges: Insights From a Games Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating games as a means to develop e‐learning: Insights from a psychological perspective

Terras¹,

Boyle²

2019

Although the Education sector has pioneered the use of technology, the pace of technological change has outstripped the slower processes of theoretical development and critical reflection, so the field is highly fragmented and lacks a comprehensive evidence base to support future development. In this paper, we consider how the insights offered by games and a psychological perspective can address the current challenges. Both games and e-learning specialists are facing similar challenges and would therefore benefit from adopting a more integrated approach in the future. We demonstrate how this integration can best be achieved by viewing the challenges through a psychological lens which informs theory, research and practice in user-centred design, supports the development of more widely applicable theories of learning and pedagogy, recognises of the complexity of the contexts in which learning occurs and offers an established evidence-based framework to aid integration at the theoretical level. This emphasises the continued importance of classic concepts such as transfer, cognitive load and the increasing blurred boundaries between formal and informal learning, but also in terms of methodology and as a catalyst for future debate and discussion.