This book presents a challenging and multi-faceted research project that required state-of-the-art methodological approaches. The project involved analyzing data collected from 10,000 research articles published in ten leading journals in the area of educational technology over 20 years, from January 1994 to December 2014; advanced analytic approaches such as latent semantic analysis; and expert insights and interpretations of the subject matter.
It captures the trends in a number of research streams within the discipline of educational technology and identifies the point in time when a massive change took place. This is a significant achievement given that, in epistemology and philosophy of science, there have always been discussions of paradigm shifts, but researchers have always identified them qualitatively. This is the first work to identify a paradigm shift using rigorous quantitative methods.
The analysis procedure involved big data and sophisticated analysis, which supported the identification of clusters at several breakpoints from which the richest set was selected in order to provide the most detailed analysis. This comprehensive analysis also shows what has been published and by whom in those ten top-tier journals. This work makes a highly significant contribution to the field of learning technologies and provides the groundwork and a significant data source for other scholars, both new and experienced, to build on and expand in their work.
Gloria Natividad is the Department of Academic Development´s Head, at the Technological Institute of Higher Education of Saltillo, Mexico. She earned a M.C. in Applied Technology, Training and Development and a Ph.D. in Applied Technology and Performance Improvement from the University of North Texas at Denton. She served as the Editorial Assistant of the fourth edition of the Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology, as well as of the Encyclopedia of Educational Technology. She serves as the Editorial Assistant of the Development Section of Educational Technology Research & Development.
J. Michael Spector is a Professor of Learning Technologies at the University of North Texas. He was previously Professor of Educational Psychology and Instructional Technology at the University of Georgia, and Professor of Instructional Systems at Florida State University. He served as Chair of Instructional Design, Development and Evaluation at Syracuse University and Director of the Educational Information Science and Technology Research Program at the University of Bergen. He earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from The University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on intelligent support for instructional design, assessing learning in complex domains, and technology integration in education. Dr. Spector is a Past President of the Association for Educational and Communications Technology. He is editor of
Educational Technology Research & Development and serves on numerous other editorial boards. He edited the third and fourth editions of the
Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology, as well as the
Encyclopedia of Educational Technology, and has more than 150 publications to his credit.
Nicholas Evangelopoulos is a Professor of Decision Sciences at the University of North Texas. His research interests include statistics, text mining, and cognitive computing. His publications include articles appearing in Management Information Systems Quarterly, Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, Decision Sciences, Decision Support Systems, the European Journal of Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, and many others. In 2013 he received the University of North Texas College of Business Outstanding Senior Faculty Research Award and in 2016 the University of North Texas College of Business Professional Development Institute Fellowship. He has published a book with Springer in 2013 and is currently writing a book which is under contract with Routledge (Taylor & Francis).
