This first issue of volume 36 marks the retirement of Cathy Lewin as editor. Over the last five years Cathy has overseen a number of changes and transformations to the journal. Cathy played a large part in the successful merger of Learning, Media & Technology and Education, Communication & Information into the journal that you are now reading. She was also instrumental in expanding the publication schedule to four issues a year, as well as commissioning a number of cutting‐edge ‘special issue’ collections. Most recently Cathy has worked hard with colleagues at Taylor & Francis to ensure that the journal is included in the Social Sciences Citation Index and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index. For all these reasons (and more) Cathy has been a key part of the journal's recent success. So on behalf of the editorial board, we would like to thank Cathy for her hard work, and look forward to her continued role as an editorial board member. To take on some of the responsibilities that Cathy is leaving behind, we would like to welcome Rebecca Eynon from the University of Oxford as an incoming member of the editorial team.
These changes present an opportunity to reflect on what the journal has become over the past five years, and the direction that we hope it will take in the near future. Certainly the fields of educational technology and educational media have changed dramatically during this period. Learning, Media and Technology has featured a growing number of articles on the educational implications of various ‘social media’ tools and applications – from Facebook to Secondlife, from YouTube to Twitter. Authors are now considering the educational implications of ‘the cloud’, the ‘semantic web’ and the growing convergence of different media forms and practices, produced and consumed using a variety of portable platforms and personalised devices. Alongside the continual technical (re)development of tools and applications there have been some substantial shifts in the nature of technology‐based practices and activities. These include the apparent rise of ‘informal’ and ‘hyper‐individualised’ educational practices as well as the concurrent ‘mass socialisation’ of technologybased learning. Academic interest in the consequences of technology and media use for knowledge, learning and pedagogy have therefore shifted away from linear issues of ‘use’ and ‘outcomes’ to more nuanced concerns with the design and evaluation of learning technologies, as well as the social complexities of their use in situ.
With all these changes in mind, it is crucial for a journal like Learning, Media and Technology to approach the topics of educational technology and educational media in an inquisitive and open‐minded manner, while keeping a rigorous and critical eye on the more excessive and exaggerated aspects of the field. These qualities of rigour and criticality are especially important with regards to the nature of the empirical work that is conducted (and published) in the name of educational technology and media. As editors we are concerned – first and foremost – with helping the journal live up to its stated aim of publishing ‘critical and comparative analyses including paradigms and methodologies that cross disciplinary and cultural boundaries’. Many of the articles that are unsuccessfully submitted for publication in the journal fall down primarily in terms of the quality of their data collection and subsequent analyses. While there is a place for descriptive small‐scale case studies of individual technologies in specific contexts, the fields of educational technology and educational media urgently need to expand their methodological horizons. Where are the rich ethnographic studies of educational technology and media use? Where are the detailed statistical studies, randomised controlled trials or meta‐analyses? Where is the methodological sophistication that our field deserves?
Similarly, the theoretical development of the field needs writers and researchers to challenge some of the cosy assumptions and received wisdoms that inform work in this area. Far too often, educational technology and media journals feature a succession of relatively interchangeable (and relatively uninspired) socio‐constructivist tinged accounts of ‘learning’ and ‘technology’. Often these accounts – while interesting – offer little critical reflection on the goodness of fit between the twentieth‐century learning theory being applied and the twenty‐first‐century learning practices being discussed. There surely must be more to the field of educational technology than the (mis)use of Vygotskian theory, notions of ‘communities of practice’ and so on. There have certainly been developments in related fields that could usefully inform research here. We need more sustained attempts at theory building in order to understand the roles that contemporary media and technology play in educational contexts. We also need serious engagement with the wider developments over the last 20 years or so in terms of social theory, psychological theory and so on. Our research should not just draw from these traditions, using them to justify what we are doing, but should be rich and rigorous enough to contribute back to them as well.
On a final note of soul‐searching, it would be wonderful to hope that the next five years of Learning, Media and Technology can contribute to a broadening of the disciplinary scope of debate. A journal such as ours should make greater efforts to include the voices and perspectives of scholars working outside of education studies and social psychology. Recent issues have seen a growing influx of contributions from writers and researchers working in geography, communications studies, sociology, computer science and beyond. This breaking down of disciplinary barriers is surely key to the continued success of the journal. Our hope is that Learning, Media and Technology should be seen as a broad church for critical, rigorous and challenging debate – regardless of subject discipline or ‘–ism’.
Feel free to remind us in five years’ time of how successful (or not) we have been in realising all of these ambitions …
Neil Selwyn and Martin Oliver
Editors