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

Abstract

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...

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