This article asks five questions that lead us to the foundations of design practice in educational technology. Design processes structure time, space, place, activity, role, goal, and resource. For educational technology to advance in its understanding of design practice, it must question whether we have clear conceptions of how abstract…

Due to rapid advancements in our ability to collect, process, and analyze massive amounts of data, it is now possible for educational institutions to gain new insights into how people learn (Kumar, 2013). E-learning has become an important part of education, and this form of learning is especially suited to the use of big data and data analysis,…

Higher education institutions have been playing a pivotal role in the emergence and elaboration of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. Initially, pioneering institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have led the conceptualization of OER, providing models of sustainable initiatives. Following the forerunners,…

This special issue expands our understanding of teaching and learning through video game play, with specific attention to culture. The issue gives insight into the ways educators, researchers, and developers should be discussing and designing for impactful learner-centered game-based learning experiences. The issue features forward-thinking…

Educational videogames support productive learning by organizing content in relation to meaningful contexts and roles. Videogames can also create new opportunities for understanding and supporting learning when the game ends. This presents formative transitions as a strategy for revealing what players learn through videogames, while also…

This article discusses video games as "attractors" to "affinity spaces." It argues that affinity spaces are key sites today where people teach and learn 21st Century skills. While affinity spaces are proliferating on the Internet as interest-and-passion-driven sites devoted to a common set of endeavors, they are not new, just…

Culture can be understood as systems that produce and reproduce meaning, or as stable sets of meanings within a community. The authors illustrate how educational games produce and reproduce meaning, both related to the content being addressed and about the educational process itself. Educational games also rely on shared meanings and norms, which…

Many resources now punctuate the maker movement landscape. However, some schools and communities still struggle to understand this burgeoning movement. How do we define these spaces and differentiate them from previous labs and shops? Through a multidimensional framework, stakeholders should consider how the structure, access, staffing, and tools…

Digital gaming communities are nuanced and developing. The eSports community has advanced in noticeable ways and represents the highest form of online competitive play for digital gaming environments. Due to the high stakes nature of eSports, its participants sit on the very edge of strategic planning boundaries and push the ceiling of…

The 2016 National Educational Technology Plan mentions fostering creativity, collaboration, leadership, and critical thinking while engaging learners in complex, real-world challenges through a project-based learning approach (see http://tech.ed.gov/netp/learn ing/). The Partnership for 21st Century Learning (P21; see…

This essay explores the nature of creativity of the practicing professional through the examination of the role of personal style in creative work, as well as how personality can affect and sustain creativity. Instructional designers, as practicing creatives, must balance the divergent and novel with the restraints of clients, projects, and…

A prescription favored in this article calls for the joint use of "learning maps" and "instructional maps." Why then the "Vs." in the title? Simply put, it is a rhetorical device. It calls attention to a key difference between the two. This article explicates the difference. It also informs how alone and in…

This article is written in the first-person, from the perspective of Steven Canning, a SUNY Potsdam instructor of educational technology and part-time professional gamer, with contributions from Anthony Betrus, Professor of Educational Technology at SUNY Potsdam. The author delves deeply into the world of professional online gaming, or eSports,…

Educators are obliged to balance new resources with a healthy skepticism of change. This review of technological advances in creativity research highlights methods that scaffold both research and the students who stand to benefit from resultant findings. Educational technology need not lower its role to that of enabler. With proper guidance,…

This article proposes that the widespread availability of wireless networks creates a case in which there is no real need for SIM cards. Recent technological developments offer the capability to outperform SIM cards and provide more innovative dimensions to current systems of mobility. In this context of changing realities in the domain of…