Trends in Educational Technology: What Facebook, Twitter, and Scopus Can Tell us about Current Research and Practice

Abstract

Using large-scale, public data sources, this editorial provides a high-level description of educational technology trends leading up to and encompassing the year 2020. Data sources included (a) 17.9 million Facebook page posts by K-12 educational institutions in the U.S., (b) 131,760 tweets to the #EdTech hashtag on Twitter, and (c) 29,636 educational technology articles in the Scopus database. We provide a variety of descriptive results in the form of participation frequency charts, keyword matches, URL domain link counts, co-occurring hashtags, tweet text word trees, and common word and bigram frequencies. Results from the analysis of Facebook posts indicated that (a) schools increasingly used the platform over time, (b) the pandemic increased frequency (but not the nature) of use, (c) schools are progressively sharing more media, information, and tools, and (d) some of these tools align with trends identified by Weller ( 2020 ) while others do not. Analysis of tweets indicated that (a) discussions in 2020 revolved around “remote learning” and related topics, (b) this emphasis shifted or morphed into “elearning” and “online learning” as the year progressed, (c) shared posts were primarily informational or media-based, and (d) the space was heavily directed by a relatively small group of Superusers. Last, analysis of articles in Scopus indicated that (a) online learning is historically the most-researched topic in the field, (b) the past decade reflects a shift to more “open” and “social” topics, and (c) there seems to be a lag or disconnect between emergent high-interest technologies and research. Taken together, we conclude that these results show the field’s preparation for addressing many challenges of 2020, but propose that, moving forward, we would be better served by embracing greater philosophical plurality and better addressing key issues, including equity and practicality.

Facebook Post Data: A Primer for Educational Research

“…One study used posts on Facebook to understand what educational technologies K-12 educational institutions used. In this study, the authors examined the links included in millions of posts by United States schools and districts, finding that Google-owned domains associated with tools for finding, sharing, and managing myriad files were the most predominant (Kimmons et al, 2021). This study on the sharing of links is one example of the kind of research on topics and events and people and organizations that have been the locus of much of the research using data from Twitter.…”

Education Technology Research Trends in Indonesia during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…(Mishra et al, 2021). In 2020, trends in educational technology showed the use of social media, Facebook, Twitter in online learning (Kimmons et al, 2021). During the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an explosion in the use of educational technology, which has shifted traditional learning to learning that applies information technology (Nguyen & Chung, 2020).…”

Are Violations of Student Privacy “Quick and Easy"? Implications of K-12 Educational Institutions’ Posts on Facebook

“…As the number of people using social media has increased, the risks to the privacy of social media users have also increased [23], and this is particularly true since social media use expands into areas of our lives that it did not previously occupy. Education is one such domain in which social media use is now widespread [2,10,11,13,21,22]-and is one domain for which the privacy risks from social media use, in general, may be compounded because of the centrality of a particularly vulnerable population, minors at school.…”

“…While past research has explored the willingness of social media participants and students to share their data for research, a different-institutional rather than personal-context for social media use presents potentially notable privacy risks. Namely, past research has shown that both post-secondary [13] and K-12 educational institutions use social media extensively; particularly, Twitter and Facebook [10,11]. However, to this point, no research has yet investigated privacy in the context of social media use by K-12 educational institutions.…”

“…This topic-K-12 institutions' use of social media from a privacy perspective-is relevant and timely for a number of reasons. Recent research has shown that institutions are very active on both Twitter and Facebook, being associated with more than 300,000 posts/month from the accounts of K-12 districts and schools [11]. As a consequence, there could be hundreds of thousands of students with their identities being posted in a highly public, searchable, persistent record, and in a way that could be misused in the future.…”