EJEL Volume 6 Issue 3
October 2008

Distinguishing the Field of Educational Technology

Laura Czerniewicz
University of Cape Town, South Africa

Drawing on what researchers and professionals in the field internationally report, this paper reviews educational technology as an emergent field. The review reveals the continuum of perspectives on what the field is, and how it is bounded or fragmented. The paper describes the field from two perspectives: the professional and the scholarly and considers how the forms of knowledge differ and overlap in each domain. It posits some dichotomies which may frame the field such as science/ social science and positivist/post-modernist. Finally the paper provides conceptual frameworks for distinguishing fields from one another and suggests what the categorisation of the field might mean, especially considering its emergent status in a rapidly changing context.

Keywords: educational technology, e-learning, profession, discipline, field, knowledge.

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