A National Center for Edtech Research

A National Center for Edtech Research

My greatest hopes for this new Center include providing some focus to a field that seems not to have had much and encouraging researchers to continue lines of research with both large and small studies.

The field hasn't had a lot of focus in resent years. I don't include Web 2.0 as a focus :) There have been some exploratory areas of research that have seen lots of work, including the broad topics of virtual worlds, online interactions, and materials design; however, even within these areas of study, they seems to be little coherence between studies and few substantial studies.

This leads to my next point, which is that a Center for Edtech research should encourage the establishment of lines of research that focus on building incrementally on and replicating previous research. You may say, "researchers already do this, silly!" I would have to respond that they tend not to replicate previous research at all and when it comes to building incrementally on previous research, they most often vary so much from the previous research that they research hardly counts as incremental.

I'm a little vague here, but I think that these two roles will result in our work having more influence in education and throughout the sciences.