I didn’t really learn anything from reading Week Four’s articles – though they did confirm my suspicions and expectations about research on mobile collaborative learning and online learning. I expected the research to be primarily with post-secondary students in the areas of humanities and language acquisition and there to be hardly anything to do with secondary school mathematics. I also expected that the research would increase over time as “mobile collaborative learning is a rapidly growing research field” (Qing-Ke Fu & Hwang, 2018) and information on how to implement it effectively would be deemed important.

The lack of research on wearable technology was also expected as this is such a new area. Twelve years ago, a popular mathematics investigation at my school was the Grade 9 Cell Phone problem, where students inquired into available plans that their family or they themselves could use. The investigating culminated in a persuasive letter to their parents about why they should get a cell phone as a Christmas present, backing up their request with solid mathematics presented in tables, equations, and charts. Many families found they could save money even when adding another cell phone to their plan because of this investigation. We had to drop the assignment about seven years ago as plans had changed and most of our grade 9s already owned a cell phone. Last examination session, we had to ban students from bringing watches into the exam room because of the increase in wearable technology. Do I expect this to become a future trend? Of course, since it can affect the learning environment.

I was also not surprised that “little attention was paid to the issues of higher order skills, learning performance (skillful), self-efficacy, confidence or anticipation performance, cognitive load, and learning anxiety” (Quig-Ke Fu & Hwang, 2018). The easily accessible information is on lower order skills, so those would be the areas explored first.

I did find a couple of interesting tidbits in the Arneson et al article (2019). They really looked at their authorship. There were 57 articles by one person out of 356 articles with a total of 384 distinct authors and 57.3% were written by these top 20 authors. “Given that our initial analysis of the complete set of data was skewed in favor of one author, to gain another perspective we narrowed our scope of authors by limiting them to those who had articles published in journals listed in Scopus. . . Scopus is a more selective database.” This could be useful for me when I am conducting my literature review.

Another item of interest was that “most of the high-volume keywords in abstracts related to the training of teachers or the administration and organization of K-12 online learning, without as much apparent focus on pedagogy and learning issues.” This showed me how important the wording of the abstract is and how it will affect my own research. Knowing that the “number of articles discussing K-12 online learning has been steadily growing” reinforces my decision to only look at articles over the last five years. Also, the technologies available need to be the most current, which is why I planned on focusing on recent articles. I am please that there is a trend in the last five years for more interpretive articles, as that is what I will be needing: “Overall, the most common article classification was theoretical, However, interpretive and inferential articles appear to be growing in frequency, and in the past 5 years, interpretive articles became more common than theoretical articles.”

So although I didn’t learn anything new, it was helpful to have my thoughts and experiences validated by reading these two articles:

  • Qing-Ke Fu, Q-K., & Hwang, G-J. (2018). Trends in mobile technology-supported collaborative learning: A systematic review of journal publications from 2007 to 2016.  Computers & Education, 119, pp. 129-143, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2018.01.004
  • Arnesen, K.T., Hveem, J., Short, C.R. West, R.E.  & Barbour, M.K.  (2019) K-12 online learning journal articles: trends from two decades of scholarship, Distance Education, 40(1), 32-53, https://DOI: 1080/01587919.2018.1553566