Jacques Ellul, a 20th century French academic, is best known for his writing on technique, understood as both individual means to ends and an all-encompassing system that prioritizes efficient solutions to problems. While Ellul’s terminology is not necessarily familiar in contemporary educational technology research, it represents traditional understandings of individual tools as a subset of instructional systems and captures the field’s emphasis on finding more efficient and efficacious means of teaching and learning. However, Ellul’s writing on technique is largely skeptical, creating an opportunity for educational technology researchers to turn a more critical eye towards our emphasis on solutions to problems. This essay argues that while an increased emphasis problems over things is welcome, Ellul’s writing invites more careful consideration of what it means to solve problems. In particular, I draw on Ellul to ask three provocative questions: which problems should we solve, who should solve those problems, and is solving problems always good?

Deeper assumptions frequently shape the ways educational technology stakeholders collect and use data. This influence of assumptions on data decisions makes it critical that educational technology stakeholders engage with deeper assumptions as part of ethical considerations; indeed, they are key to ensuring that stakeholders engage with structural issues in education and educational technology rather than use ethical compliance as a superficial nod to questions of justice, harm, and power. In this chapter, I illustrate the relationship between deep assumptions and data ethics by considering assumptions related to four broad questions about the purpose of education, the purpose of educational technology, the determination of quality in educational (technology) research, and who has what say in these domains. Debates about data ethics are often better understood as debates about these deeper assumptions, which must be surfaced to consider data ethics in our field thoroughly.

Scholars working in the area of children and youth services (CYS) have called for researchers and educators to look to disciplines outside of Library and Information Science (LIS) for inspiration in moving this area of the field forward. In this paper, we explore the opportunities provided by incorporating theoretical approaches and concepts from the fields of childhood studies, learning sciences, and educational technology in three separate special topics courses offered at the University of Kentucky. In these courses, we draw on our knowledge and expertise within fields external to LIS in order to encourage our students to think deeply and critically about how they think about, interact with, and provide services for children and youth. While two of the three courses are not solely focused on children and youth, all include content relevant to CYS professionals. In each section, we highlight the ways in which our different disciplinary expertise influences both the material we teach and the ways in which we teach. We then discuss the commonalities amongst our experiences and the potential that incorporating concepts and theories from these and other disciplines has for broadening CYS curricula more generally.

‘Alternative’ social media platforms like Parler and Gab—on which hate speech and conspiracy theories often exist unchecked—present an opportunity for instructional designers and other education professionals to revisit assumptions about informal learning on social media. Employing a conceptual framework that distinguishes education from miseducation, we use these controversial platforms to argue that educators should more fully consider: 1) the miseducation happening in learning spaces, 2) how the design of educational technologies may amplify miseducation, and 3) the importance that formal education resist miseducation.

Social media platforms have firmly established themselves as phenomena of interest for Learning Design and Technology (LDT) researchers, and the data accessible from these platforms provide new methodological possibilities. Given the number, diversity, and constant evolution of both social media platforms and research tools, it would be inappropriate to suggest that there is a single correct way to carry out LDT research with social media data. In contrast, this chapter introduces six broad, interconnected steps to social media research: Conducting Ethical Research; Framing the Research; Organizing the Research Process; Collecting Data; Analyzing Data; and Writing, Sharing, and Publicizing Research. Each step is associated with several considerations, careful attention to which will guide researchers toward a particular correct way to accomplish their specific research objectives.

In this chapter, the authors argue that although portfolios are a popular means of teacher evaluation, they, like any other assessment, must be properly implemented if they are to realize their full potential. Accordingly, they offer seven “pretty good practices” (Mishra, 2008) for designing portfolio courses: peer feedback, authentic audience, diverse resources, learning by doing, open access, confidential spaces, and self-pacing. These practices were developed from the authors’ extensive work helping teachers to develop portfolios that demonstrate their learning in their graduate studies, and they help students create portfolios that have value as both summative assessments and places for formative growth. In the spirit of “pretty good practices,” however, the authors invite others to modify these practices for other contexts or to carry out research that would help refine and improve them.