Peer Reviewes Artice About National Trends in Social Studies in Elementary Education
TechTrends. 2020; 64(6): 803–809.
Current Trends (and Missing Links) in Educational Technology Research and Do
Royce Kimmons
Brigham Young University, Provo, UT Us
Abstract
It has historically been difficult to observe reliable, up-to-date information nigh educational technology trends, such every bit what researchers are studying and what tools practitioners are using, thereby making it hard for researchers and practitioners to synergize their efforts in meaningful, socially-responsive ways. In this editorial, I analyze titles and abstracts of 7708 research articles from prominent journals over the past v years to place common topics—such every bit "online," "mobile," and "learning analytics." I also extract links from 51,496 1000-12 school and 1317 university websites in the U.S. to identify mutual tools that they are linking to—such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, and YouTube. I advise that these sorts of metrics provide a baseline agreement for other researchers and practitioners to describe upon when situating their work and that they can likewise give us insights into areas that merit greater attending for addressing existent-world problems.
Keywords: Trends, Bibliometrics, Web scraping, Big data, Inquiry-practice divides, Educational engineering science
It is often difficult for educational technology professionals to find reliable data on current trends in the field. This can make it challenging for stakeholders, as (a) policymakers struggle to know what technologies are being used and researched, (b) practitioners struggle to know how they should adapt to changing needs and possibilities, and (c) researchers struggle to understand diffusion patterns of promising tools and how to use them to accost meaningful problems.
In add-on to this difficulty, in our field we often seem to struggle to sympathise and articulate how our work is valuable to society, lacking the ability to solve many real bug in real settings. For instance, though the COVID-19 pandemic recently influenced rapid shifts to remote and online learning—something that educational technology professionals are technically well-equipped to back up—very real emergent concerns over disinterestedness, digital inclusion, privacy, and accessibility for students of all ages reveal that we as a field could be providing better leadership in the human being attribute of learning—the "educational" aspect of "educational technology" (Goldstein 2020; Veletsianos and Kimmons 2020).
Many researchers have argued for decades that our field should be more than situated and socially aware (Reeves et al. 2005), explaining that "there is a clear demand for [us] ... to have stock of who we are, what it is nosotros do, and how and why we practice information technology," paying greater attention "to how digital technologies are actually being used—for meliorate and worse—in 'real-world' educational settings" (Selwyn 2010, pp. 65–66). Yet, digital divides persist in evolving forms (Dolan 2016), research and practice are often misaligned (Amiel and Reeves 2008), and even seemingly fundamental ethical and social considerations oftentimes remain conspicuously ignored (like addressing issues of discriminatory design [Benjamin 2019] or making school websites universally attainable for students [Kimmons and Smith 2019]).
In a recent report of 3 years of manufactures from a prominent educational technology journal, Stonemason (2018) found that "in a substantial portion of the discourse, at that place is a deep metaphor of engineering every bit the agent or driver of social progress underlying the thinking of many authors" (p. 550), oftentimes implying that "technologies have their own autonomy and agency" (p. 545). Yet, technologies rather seem to just exacerbate many of the deep problems we face as groups, because "the societies in which technologies are introduced are not neutral, [and] if a club or schoolhouse is racist, sexist, or ableist, supposedly neutral technologies can amplify those bigotries" (Krutka et al. 2020, p. 112).
To be clear, there are leaders in the field who have sought to address these important issues for decades (east.one thousand., Dickson-Deane et al. 2018; Marri 2005; Mehta and Aguilera 2020; Selwyn 2004; Sulecio de Alvarez and Dickson-Deane 2018; Tawfik et al. 2016; Tufekci 2014; Watters 2019), but our overall tone can remain highly technocentric and technophilic rather than learner-centric and humanizing, wherein "the nearly abiding emergence of new technologies has simply created the new problem of learning to utilize those [specific] technologies effectively [to] support learning" (Spector 2020, p. 834). Yet, as Spector (2020) recently argued: "We tin can do better as educators and educational technology researchers. Nosotros can forego the impulse to use a technology just because information technology is new … [and] focus on helping students learn—all students … not just the gifted or those we like or who like u.s.a. or who are like u.s." (p. 835).
In this brief editorial, I will share some loftier-level results of two analyses—trending inquiry topics among prominent educational engineering research journals for the past 5 years and trending links from K-12 school and university websites in the U.S. in 2019—to show what is currently happening in educational technology, where in that location might be potential disconnects between enquiry and practice, and how nosotros might realign our emphases to better accost pertinent real-world problems. These analyses rely wholly upon public information sources bachelor through the internet (Kimmons and Veletsianos 2018), and though not exhaustive or representative of all contexts, they should at least provide some useful lenses for discerning what is happening (and perhaps what is missing) in educational technology.
Trending Inquiry Topics
To empathise the topics educational engineering researchers take been studying over the past five years, I used the Elsevier Scopus (n.d.) API to collect all articles from the most-highly-cited journals in the field of educational technology as identified by Google Scholar (n.d.), which included TechTrends, Computers & Pedagogy, Educational Applied science Research & Evolution, and 13 others. This produced 7708 articles with titles and abstracts. I and then parsed each title and abstract into a list of keywords, removing stopwords (e.g., "a," "and," "the"), reducing words to their stems (e.1000., "reading" and "reads" to "read", "games" and "game-based" to "game"), and group words equally positional pairs (e.g., "learning" and "environment" together for "learning environment"). Titles produced over 8500 unique keywords (eastward.thousand., "flipped," "classroom"), while abstracts produced nearly 30,000. Reading top keywords and pairs for the current yr, I excluded those that dealt with full general aspects of the field (e.g., "technology," "learning"), research methods (e.k., "case report"), participants (e.g., "teachers"), grade levels, then forth, allowing the analysis to focus on those that dealt with specific areas of study, topics, or technologies. Top results for article titles in the current year are provided in Tabular array 1, and results from abstracts are provided in Tabular array two. In each table, raw numbers of articles that included the keyword or pair are provided from 5 years ago, while subsequent years are represented as percentage increases or decreases from each previous year to prove relative adjustments over time.
Tabular array iii
Trending technologies from school website links
| Resource | Category | Representation | Avg. links |
|---|---|---|---|
| Social Networking | 56.7% | ane.5 | |
| Microblogging | 55.3% | i.half-dozen | |
| Google Docs | Collaborative Authoring | 25.9% | 2.vi |
| YouTube | Video Sharing | 25.3% | 1.iii |
| Image Sharing | 23.two% | 1.3 | |
| Google Sites | Website Hosting | 23.i% | 3.5 |
| Google Drive | Document Sharing | xx.0% | iii.8 |
| Search | 15.2% | v.iv | |
| SchoolMessenger | Notifications | 10.0% | i.0 |
| Google Interpret | Automated Translation | 8.6% | 23.iv |
| My Schoolhouse Bucks | Meal Payment | 6.4% | 1.1 |
| Social Networking | 6.3% | ane.2 | |
| PeachJar | Circulate Communications | 6.2% | 1.1 |
| Google Mail | Electronic mail | 5.2% | 1.1 |
| School Diet and Fitness | Lunch Menus | 5.0% | 1.3 |
| School Loop | Communications | four.vi% | 2.0 |
| Aesop Online | Absence Direction | 4.five% | one.0 |
| Board Docs | Certificate Sharing | four.2% | i.two |
| Vimeo | Video Sharing | three.8% | 1.2 |
Table 4
Trending technologies from college and university website links
| Resource | Category | Representationa | Avg. Links |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microblogging | – | i.5 | |
| Social Networking | 91.7% | 1.4 | |
| Image Sharing | 79.2% | 1.4 | |
| YouTube | Video Sharing | 76.0% | 1.3 |
| Social Networking | 44.5% | one.ii | |
| Flickr | Prototype Sharing | 13.iv% | 1.ii |
| Bookstore | Textbook Marketplace | 9.8% | 1.1 |
| Search | 9.v% | ii | |
| OmniUpdate | Content Direction Organization | 7.4% | 1 |
| Image Sharing | vii.0% | ane.1 | |
| Snapchat | Social Networking | 6.vii% | ane |
| Outlook | 5.5% | 1.2 | |
| Vimeo | Video Sharing | five.5% | ane.8 |
| YouVisit | Virtual Touring | three.7% | 1.2 |
| BrowseHappy | Software Downloads | 3.6% | ane |
| Google Mail | three.3% | i.three | |
| Microsoft Online | Electronic mail | 3.2% | 1 |
| Adobe | Software Downloads | 2.7% | 1 |
| EthicsPoint | Reporting System | 2.six% | 1 |
aThis dataset was collected from homepages provided from a previous dataset of higher and university Twitter accounts (Kimmons et al. 2017), so links to Twitter would be represented at close to 100% and accented percentages may non be representative of institutional websites broadly
Table ane
Trending topics from research article titles as ranked by 2019 prevalence
| Rank | Keyword or Pair | Paired examples | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Online | Online learning, online education | 124 | 24% | −11% | 3% | 17% |
| 2 | Mobile | Mobile learning, mobile games | 44 | 27% | −13% | 41% | seven% |
| 3 | Games | Game-based learning | threescore | 10% | −6% | 53% | −31% |
| 4 | Linguistic communication | Languages | 53 | 49% | 20% | −28% | −9% |
| v | Flipped | Flipped classroom | 7 | 43% | 210% | 29% | 48% |
| vi | Learning Environment | – | 44 | xxx% | 0% | −33% | 39% |
| seven | English equally a Foreign Language (EFL) | – | 27 | −7% | 4% | −46% | 193% |
| 8 | Science | – | 53 | −xiii% | 24% | −28% | 0% |
| 9 | Video | Video-based | 15 | 27% | 84% | −14% | 33% |
| x | MOOC | – | 32 | −22% | 24% | 26% | 3% |
| eleven | E-Learning | – | 26 | 92% | −28% | −33% | 63% |
| 12 | Writing | – | 24 | 29% | 29% | −33% | 37% |
| 13 | Data | Information-driven, data-based | 23 | −17% | 11% | −nineteen% | 76% |
| xiv | Blended | Blended learning | 25 | 48% | −27% | −11% | 25% |
| 15 | Learning Analytics | – | 8 | 88% | −forty% | 167% | 13% |
| 16 | Media | Media-based | 24 | 29% | 45% | −38% | −7% |
| 17 | Reading | – | xvi | 63% | 35% | −31% | iv% |
| 18 | Virtual Reality | – | v | xx% | −33% | 250% | 71% |
| 19 | Augmented Reality | – | four | 275% | −20% | −25% | 133% |
| 20 | Distance | Altitude learning | twenty | −x% | −11% | 19% | 5% |
| 21 | Mathematics | – | 29 | 21% | 29% | −51% | −14% |
Table 2
Trending topics from research commodity abstracts as ranked by 2019 prevalence
| Rank | Keyword Pair | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ane | Learning Environs | 124 | 17% | −1% | −15% | 24% |
| 2 | Online Learning | 46 | 67% | −21% | −20% | 65% |
| iii | Online Course | 65 | 2% | −15% | 13% | 17% |
| four | Learner Experience | 46 | 17% | 9% | −7% | 24% |
| v | Language Learning | 42 | 62% | −29% | −4% | xxx% |
| 6 | Foreign Language | 52 | 12% | 10% | −39% | 51% |
| 7 | Mobile Learning | 28 | 39% | −eight% | 0% | 33% |
| 8 | Collaborative Learning | 43 | 23% | −17% | −2% | vii% |
| 9 | Social Network | 39 | 8% | 5% | −20% | 23% |
| 10 | Learning Analytics | 15 | 20% | −17% | 127% | 21% |
| 11 | Flipped Classroom | 7 | 100% | 79% | 8% | 48% |
| 12 | Social Media | 24 | 108% | −24% | −26% | 32% |
We encounter from these title results that the modality "online" (east.g., "online learning," "online teaching") has clearly been the virtually-researched topic over the past 5 years, followed by the modality "mobile," and accompanied by related modalities of "e-learning," "composite," and "distance." The well-nigh-researched subject area areas in this fourth dimension period included "language" (including "EFL"), "science," "writing," "reading," and "mathematics." The virtually-researched applications of technologies or approaches accept included "games," "flipped," "learning environment," "video," "MOOCs, "media," "virtual reality," and "augmented reality," with "data" and "learning analytics" too making the listing.
When analyzing abstracts, simply keyword pairs were considered, given the greater variability and volume of common words extracted from the lengthier artifacts (e.k., "pupil," "education"), and keyword pairs representing generalities, research methods, participants, etc. were excluded to focus on areas of study, topics, and technologies. Again, modalities were highly represented (east.g., "online learning," "online form," "mobile learning," "flipped classroom") along with "language learning" and "strange linguistic communication" as the dominant bailiwick areas and "social network," "learning analytics," and "social media" as the dominant technologies or applications.
Taken together, these title and abstruse results suggest that researchers over the past 5 years (a) take focused heavily on studying learning environments equally modalities (e.one thousand., online, mobile, flipped), (b) have done and so with the purpose of achieving learning goals related to language learning, science, writing, reading, and mathematics, and (c) accept used various technologies toward these ends, with learning analytics, virtual reality, augmented reality, and social media being some of the most prominent (Figs 1 & 2.).
Trending topics from research article titles as ranked past 2019 prevalence
Trending keyword pairs from inquiry article abstracts as ranked by 2019 prevalence
Trending Technologies from Institutional Websites
As another data source, I also parsed links from 51,496 U.Due south. Thousand-12 schoolhouse websites and 1317 U.S. college or academy websites to endeavor to determine what tools these institutions were linking to (and by extension using) with their students and communities. Considering the number of unique links exhibited highly positive skew (with many sites providing very few external links), I excluded all sites below the median number of unique external links (median = 16 for K-12 schools). This resulted in the analysis of 954 K external links from K-12 sites, representing 25,889 websites, and 82 Chiliad external links from college and university sites, representing x,682 websites.
Results indicated that the top sites that Yard-12 schools linked to included social media sites (e.one thousand., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn), media sharing sites (e.g., YouTube, Vimeo), a host of different Google tools (Docs, Sites, Bulldoze, Interpret, Mail), and various other tools that are designed to support school business management and advice processes (east.g., SchoolMessenger, My School Bucks, PeachJar). These results mimicked other studies on schoolhouse websites, which have generally shown that schools link to gratis, generic, not-pedagogical tools, like YouTube, much more than fee-based or education-specific tools, like SchoolTube (Kimmons 2015; Kimmons et al. 2019). College and university websites exhibited like prioritization of links to social media, email, and image and video sharing services, coupled with a few types of services unique to that marketplace (e.g., virtual campus tours).
Trends and Missing Links
Though web scraping of school websites is by no ways a complete mensurate of school use and cannot capture most pedagogical and classroom uses, differences betwixt what is being researched and what is being used by educational institutions to communicate and share with their communities should at least make the states wonder whether trending research topics really focus on what is happening in and is useful for our institutions. Google Docs/Drive, for instance, was merely mentioned in eighteen abstracts (0.2%), although it was represented on 25.9% of school websites, and Facebook and Twitter were mentioned in 132 (one.7%) and 61 (0.8%) abstracts while beingness represented on 56.7% and 55.three% of school websites (and most higher and university websites). Inquiry accent on social media overall decreased in 2017 and 2018 with a small-scale upturn in 2019, only exhibiting half the article count of "virtual reality," 1-third that of "MOOCs," and one-4th that of "flipped," and though Google Docs and other tools might be studied in articles related to collaborative writing, peer feedback, or flipped classrooms, omission of these technologies from article abstracts should at to the lowest degree give united states interruption. Does this discrepancy reveal that research is non as needed on these topics? Or that current research focuses on bug related to learning vs. specific tools? Or that a gap exists between research and exercise, with researchers and journal reviewers exhibiting a technophilic flow toward the newest technologies (rather than those that are being used by institutions to solve pressing problems)?
To further explore this, we might also consider what keywords are missing from educational technology abstracts. Notably, keywords that deal with broader social problems (even those specific to educational technology) are mostly missing over the by 5 years. The keyword "accessibility" was only included in 80 abstracts (1%); only 59 (0.8%) mentioned "women;" only 50 (0.6%) mentioned "privacy;" only 33 (0.iv%) mentioned a "digital divide;" simply 32 (0.4%) mentioned "justice;" just 27 (0.four%) mentioned "disinterestedness" or "equitable;" only 13 (0.2%) mentioned "poverty" or "impoverish;" just 9 (0.1%) mentioned "universal design;" merely viii (0.1%) mentioned "feminism" or "feminist;" simply vii (0.1%) mentioned "racial;" and merely 1 mentioned "racism" or "racist," with but about 3% of articles mentioning any of these words. Equally a specific example, only 8 (2.2%) of the 368 articles studying "online learning" in the past 5 years mentioned the word "accessibility" or "accessible" in their abstracts, and none mentioned privacy, which seems similar a major problem. If we are studying "how to make online learning work" but non "how to make it work for all students" or "how to protect our students while they are learning online," then are our attentions where they should be?
Such missing links and lack of emphasis on social issues, especially in cases that should be of paramount interest to educational technology (like digital divides, accessibility, and privacy), suggests that the field may be struggling to orient its work toward solving relevant real-world issues, and researchers should consider how their efforts tin can more meaningfully inform socially-responsible policy and practice. Some specialized inquiry areas and methods testify focus and promise in this regard, such as "open didactics" or "open educational resources," which was represented in 1.6% of abstracts, and "pattern research" or "design-based research," which was represented in ane% of abstracts, but such tokens seem a pittance when compared to pressing social needs of the day.
Equally another promising example, in a recent special issue of TechTrends, guest editors Dickson-Deane et al. (2018) argued that "we cannot accurately understand how best to attend to issues of learning and applied science without acknowledging that culture permeates all environments in which learning takes place, and every engineering science created and implemented reflects and is imbued with aspects of the culture(due south) of its creator" (p. 310). Over the past 5 years, 6.9% of abstracts in these journals accept mentioned a variant of the discussion "culture" (such every bit "sociocultural"), which, though minor, suggests some growing involvement and recognition of the topic's importance to the field.
Every bit we continue moving forward together, it is my promise to continue this editorial each March for documenting ongoing trends of educational engineering science also as our growth and development every bit a field for the previous year. Using public information sources like these as an ongoing litmus examination tin potentially assistance u.s.a. to bridge the enquiry-practice divide and to better marshal inquiry activities with emergent needs. In future versions, I plan to also include analyses of social media information and other sources to testify these trends through more than lenses that besides account for what practitioners are sharing, what they are finding to be of value, and what problems they believe to be important. Hopefully, as we continue in this heady and of import piece of work, nosotros tin can refine these data collection processes and also refine our efforts as educational researchers and practitioners to let for closer alignment between our research and practice efforts while too striving for greater harmony betwixt our professional efforts and the creation of a better, more equitable world.
Footnotes
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Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7557047/
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