Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 12
New Learning—Old Methods? How E-research
Might Change Technology-Enhanced Learning
Research
Peter Reimann and Lina Markauskaite
Faculty of Education and Social Work, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia,
e-mail: peter.reimann@sydney.edu.au; lina-markauskaite@sydney.edu.au
Introduction
We continue to be astonished how little has fundamentally changed in the
technologies and practices of doing learning research around technology enhanced
learning, compared to how dramatically the learning technologies themselves have
changed. For instance, continuously produced learning traces closely mirroring
the activity that learners enact are only occasionally considered for analysis (with
exceptions such as in mobile learning and web-based learning). Further, most stud-
ies still are short term, including the time interval considered for observation and
data recording, and analysis are performed by individual researchers, despite the fact
that the single researcher, and even a small team of researchers, are often challenged
by the amount and nature of data. This is not to say that researchers do not make
use of modern research tools and technologies—generic software such as SPSS for
quantitative analysis and NVivo for qualitative analysis are used in almost every
social research study, and highly specialized applications are increasingly devel-
oped and trialed in various domains of social and behavioral research (described in
journals such as
Social Science Computer Review
and
Behavior Research Methods
).
Software tools indeed are often used. However, the inquiry approaches and the social
organization of how research is being organized and conducted have changed only
little, at least not as much as research practices in fields such as particle physics,
medicine, astronomy, or molecular biology.
Moreover, the availability of an increasingly large number of technologies that
are used at different stages of the inquiry cycle (from data capturing and analysis
and writing up and publishing results) raises the question to which extent different
tools yield comparable and compatible outcomes. This issue is gaining particular
in importance as the software industry is moving from applications on individual
computers to (web-based) services (Jacbos, 2005), allowing research practices to be
more distributed and integrated than before.
