摘要：As I come to the end of my term as editor, I have been reflecting on the questions I have been asked in this role. Other than ‘‘will you publish my paper?’’, the most common question has been ‘‘what’s the benefit of technology?’’ For institutions, teams and individuals who have invested money and time in keeping up with new technologies, this is an important question. I have largely skirted around an answer, talking about my desire to see more sophisticated research questions and the need to understand the context in which one is operating. From my own experience, I have seen technology prompting numerous minor improvements in many places. This is largely due to the need, when introducing any change to teaching, to rethink and redesign the teaching and assessment (Dempster, Benfield, and Francis 2012). Technology often prompts such redesign, and the value of successions of changes that feed through into our local course-improvement cycles are not to be underestimated. Frameworks for understanding such cycles of improvement, such as Ellis and Goodyear’s (2009) ecological approach (which foregrounds the relationship between student experience and institutional context), recognise the complexity of the systems in which we operate. (Published: 24 September 2012) Citation: Research in Learning Technology 2012, 20 : 19584 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v20i0.19584
其他摘要：As I come to the end of my term as editor, I have been reflecting on the questions I have been asked in this role. Other than ‘‘will you publish my paper?’’, the most common question has been ‘‘what’s the benefit of technology?’’ For institutions, teams and individuals who have invested money and time in keeping up with new technologies, this is an important question. I have largely skirted around an answer, talking about my desire to see more sophisticated research questions and the need to understand the context in which one is operating. From my own experience, I have seen technology prompting numerous minor improvements in many places. This is largely due to the need, when introducing any change to teaching, to rethink and redesign the teaching and assessment (Dempster, Benfield, and Francis 2012). Technology often prompts such redesign, and the value of successions of changes that feed through into our local course-improvement cycles are not to be underestimated. Frameworks for understanding such cycles of improvement, such as Ellis and Goodyear’s (2009) ecological approach (which foregrounds the relationship between student experience and institutional context), recognise the complexity of the systems in which we operate.(Published: 24 September 2012)Citation: Research in Learning Technology 2012, 20: 19584 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v20i0.19584
