Educational Technology as Seen Through the Eyes of the Readers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel interactive visualization of educational technology based on readership patterns from Mendeley, offering a new perspective on research domains compared to traditional citation-based visualizations.

Contribution

It presents a new co-readership visualization method for educational technology research, evaluated through qualitative comparison and expert interviews.

Findings

Co-readership visualization covers more research areas than co-citation visualizations.

It effectively represents pedagogical and psychological research domains.

Some areas, like computer science, are underrepresented in the visualization.

Abstract

In this paper, I present the evaluation of a novel knowledge domain visualization of educational technology. The interactive visualization is based on readership patterns in the online reference management system Mendeley. It comprises of 13 topic areas, spanning psychological, pedagogical, and methodological foundations, learning methods and technologies, and social and technological developments. The visualization was evaluated with (1) a qualitative comparison to knowledge domain visualizations based on citations, and (2) expert interviews. The results show that the co-readership visualization is a recent representation of pedagogical and psychological research in educational technology. Furthermore, the co-readership analysis covers more areas than comparable visualizations based on co-citation patterns. Areas related to computer science, however, are missing from the co-readership visualization and more research is needed to explore the interpretations of size and placement of research areas on the map.