The landscape of educational technology viewed from the ETR&D journal

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to conduct a citation network analysis of Educational Technology Research and Development (ETR&D) to examine the trends and issues of the educational technology field's scholarly community that have evolved in the past two decades. The distinctive features of citation network analysis used in this study derive from a social network analysis approach to see relational and network patterns in the citation data. From this citation network analysis, we obtained the following results: (1) the ETR&D network revealed structural attributes that help us understand the features regarding how the field has developed and how scholarly works have interacted; (2) the most influential papers and scholars in the field were identified; (3) frequently co-cited papers were recognized as having a strong relationship by a few researchers and (4) five cohesive subgroups (factions) generated key research themes in the field including: instructional design, learning environments, the role of technology, educational technology research and psychological foundations. Implications and limitations of the study were discussed for future research. Problem statement and research purposeRecent reviews showed a glimpse of the field for a certain time frame but mostly focused on the rankings of individual authors and institutions, in some cases, for tenure and promotion purposes, and did not provide qualitative details on the relations and networks of scholars. What we mean by "qualitative details" concerns information on how the field has evolved and grown through collaborative scholarly works in the field. The insufficient landscape of the field has led us to become more interested in the relational patterns and networks of scholars through a citation network analysis. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to conduct a citation network analysis of papers published in ETR&D, 1989 to 2011, to examine the trends and issues of the ET field's scholarly community that have evolved in the past two decades.There are three reasons why we selected only one scholarly journal in this study: (1) we chose not to use the Publish or Perish software that many citation analyses currently use as in Zaugg et al (2011) because it is based on Google Scholar whose results are fluctuating and not stable; (2) due to the difficulty of manually manipulating large amounts of data available from the ETR&D within the time frame, selecting more than one journal was beyond our capacity and (3) the ETR&D journal included sufficient information to understand the landscape of ET because it is recognized as a top

Visualization of co-readership patterns from an online reference management system

“…While this constitutes a contemporary selection of publications, the relative low proportion of articles younger than two years indicates that not all of the latest developments might be represented in the visualization. However, in a comparable co-citation mapping effort in educational technology by Cho et al (2012), the mean age of papers was 14.1 years (Median = 14 years) which is almost double the age of publications in the co-readership analysis. In addition, only 18% of the 28 papers included in the co-citation analysis were less than 10 19 Calculation based on the exact date of data collection on 10/08/2012 This suggests that the results of a co-readership analysis may be much more up-to-date than co-citation analysis.…”

Mapping human resource development: Visualizing the past, bridging the gaps, and moving toward the future

“…Cho et al, 2011) and educational technology (Y. Cho et al, 2013). More recently, Hedayati et al (2017) identified disciplines that have contributed to contemporary HRD research through citation analysis of articles published in HRDQ from 2007 to 2013.…”

Educational technology as seen through the eyes of the readers

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