Educational technology as seen through the eyes of the readers

Abstract

In this paper, I present the evaluation of a novel knowledge domain the visualisation of educational technology. The interactive visualisation 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 visualisation was evaluated with: (1) a qualitative comparison to knowledge domain visualisations based on citations, and (2) expert interviews. The results show that the co-readership visualisation is a recent representation of pedagogical and psychological research in educational technology. Furthermore, the co-readership analysis covers more areas than comparable visualisations based on co-citation patterns. Areas related to computer science, however, are missing from the co-readership visualisation and more research is needed to explore the interpretations of size and placement of research areas on the map.