On Friday, several colleagues brought this to my attention…
This the 5th year that our NIDL team has produced a list of top 10 “good reads” from open access journal articles published over the course of the year. While many of us would like to forget the crisis and ongoing challenges we faced over 2020 due to the global Covid-19 health pandemic, there are valuable and potentially enduring lessons for the future of digital learning from our experience.
Two Separate Lists
Accordingly, in this 5th edition we have chosen to offer two separate lists arising from open access journal articles published in 2020. The first list recognises that research and scholarship in the general area of digital learning continued despite Covid-19 and in many cases articles and manuscripts were already submitted and undergoing peer review prior to the crisis. The second list that we will publish in a separate blog post relate to Covid-19 specific publications. Although the response and wider implications of the pandemic on Education, and digital learning more specifically, have yet to fully play out, a number of Covid-19 related articles and special journal issues has already been published. Hence this second list is intended to help us critically reflect on the experience and inform both future publications and ongoing responses and educational practices.
It follows that we hope you find our selections both useful and valuable for your professional reading and critically reflective learning as we begin 2021. In the words of Dr. Seuss, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go”.
The reason folks were reaching out to me was because of:
No 4 – Arnesen, K., Walters, S., Barbour, M.K., & Borup, J. (2020). Irrelevant, overlooked, or lost? Trends in 20 years of uncited and low-cited K-12 online learning articles. Online Learning, 24(2), 187-206. https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v24i2.2080
This article reports an analysis of a subset of uncited or low-cited articles from a previous study which explored trends in K-12 online learning publications from 1994 to 2016. It was chosen because this unique line of analysis looks for new knowledge and valuable lessons in places that for whatever reason may have been previously overlooked, and thus offers an interesting methodological contrast to the underlying assumptions of the co-citation analysis reported by Park and Shea (2020) in our No 2 ranked article. More to the point, it flips the assumption that if a publication mattered, then it should have been mentioned by other researchers. The article reminds us that less well-known journals which may not attract the same number of citations should not be dismissed as valuable sources of new knowledge, particularly as the authors report they did not find ‘articles that were uninteresting, poorly researched, or irrelevant’ (p.187). While the sample relates to only K-12 articles the study uncovers some interesting questions and suggests that US-based educators in particular might benefit by expanding their level of familiarity with lessor known journals published outside of North America.
I reviewed this year’s list, as well as the previous four, and this was the first time a K-12 distance, online, and blended learning article was included.
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