Themes and Trends in Korean Educational Technology Research: A Social Network Analysis of Keywords ★

The aim of this study is to identify themes and trends of Korean educational technology by examining 645 papers authored by Korean researchers in Journal of Educational Technology (JET) between 1985 and June, 2013. In addition to the keywords included in abstract, other important keywords were extracted from titles and abstracts manually. Co-word analysis was employed to reveal patterns and trends in the research by measuring the association strength of terms representative of relevant publications produced in ET field. Social network techniques were applied using UCINET for Windows to get keywords network, and Net-draw were utilized to visualize network. In order to trace dynamic changes of the ET field, the whole 29 year was further separated three consecutive periods: 1985-1994, 1995-2004, and 2005-2013. Results indicate that educational technology research in Korea has been strongly influenced by new media, design theory, educational epistemology, and educational assessment. Instructional design revealed to be most important keywords by centrality measures for among time periods, and it has received consistent and high attention over the last decade. Constructivism related keywords and network- based learning have also received growing attention since 1996. Social media related keywords (knowledge sharing, social capital, and social media etc) is emerging theme since 2005 year. The findings contribute to predict future trends of ET field and to understand the discourse about the epistemology of educational technology research by using social network techniques. The results show that ET fields have some established research themes and it also changes rapidly to embrace new themes.