Hello from TOJET

 

TOJET welcomes you.   

 

The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology, Governors State University, Sakarya University, Cleveland State University, Ohio University, Bogazici University and TUBITAK organized International Educational Technology Conference (IETC) between April 26-28, 2010 in Istanbul, Turkey. IETC series is an international educational activity for academics, teachers and educators.  This conference is now a well known educational technology event.  It promotes the development and dissemination of theoretical knowledge, conceptual research, and professional knowledge through conference activities. Its focus is to create and disseminate knowledge about the use of instructional technology for learning and teaching in education.  There were many participants from 19 countries.  These countries are Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Croatia, Cyprus, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Iran, Japan, Lithuania, Malaysia, Netherlands, Nigeria, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Turkey, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, United Arab Emirates, United States.

 

TOJET is interested in academic articles on the issues of educational technology.  The articles should talk about using educational technology in classroom, how educational technology impacts learning, and the perspectives of students, teachers, school administrators and communities on educational technology.  These articles will help researchers to increase the quality of both theory and practice in the field of educational technology.

 

The guest editor of this issue was Prof. Dr. Yavuz AKPINAR.  TOJET thanks and appreciate the guest editor and the editorial board who have acted as reviewers for one or more submissions of this issue for their valuable contributions.  TOJET's reviewers are drawn quite widely from all over the world.

 

TOJET and Istanbul University will organize the 11th International Educational Technology Conference (IETC 2011) in May 2011 in Istanbul - Turkey.  The web page of IETC is “www.iet-c.net”.

 

Call for Papers

TOJET invites article contributions. Submitted articles should be about all aspects of educational technology and may address assessment, attitudes, beliefs, curriculum, equity, research, translating research into practice, learning theory, alternative conceptions, socio-cultural issues, special populations, and integration of subjects.  The articles should also discuss the perspectives of students, teachers, school administrators and communities.  

The articles should be original, unpublished, and not in consideration for publication elsewhere at the time of submission to TOJET.

 

July 01, 2010


Editors,

Prof. Dr. Aytekin İŞMAN
Sakarya University

Prof. Dr. Jerry WILLIS
Manhattanville College

 

Preface to the Guest Editorial

 

With the last organization of IETC 2010 at the Boğaziçi University, Turkey, the IETC completed its 10 years of activities. The IETC and TOJET have benefitted much from each other. Both have bloomed from seeds of their own, got pleasure from steady growth into a respected international academic work. Whilst growing and disseminating knowledge, they both suffered and also enjoyed the multidisciplinary nature of the field of educational technology. However, the help they provided to set a populated academic community around the world is imminent and contributive. Well, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the IETC, the TOJET board decided to kindly assign two issues of TOJET to the selected paper presentations of the IETC 2010. Thirty-five papers, out of 150 papers presented in English, of the IETC 2010 were selected to be invited for submission to TOJET. After the invited author(s) completed the development of the manuscripts, each manuscript was sent to at least two reviewers. Some of the manuscript-reviews were completed and they became ready for publishing in July 2010 issue, the other works are either still with the reviewers or under development. In fact, some are now re-reviewed. Those papers developed for TOJET July 2010 issue may be outlined as follows:

 

Tam Shu Sim and her colleagues in their work attempted to provide evidence of the effect of the computer-mediated environment on the linguistic output of low proficiency learners, they titled their study as “Low proficiency learners in synchronous computer-assisted and face-to-face interactions”. Another study is within an educational technology curriculum; Andreja Istenic Starcic developed a competence framework for fostering the use of ICT in helping special needs pupils. In this study titled “educational technology for the inclusive classroom”, learning objectives of autonomy, inquiry, creativity and innovation were to be accomplished. A second study headed for helping special needs pupils was the work conducted M. G. A. D. Reis and nine other friends. They reported a case study of employing information technology based mathematics exercises for pupils with cerebral palsy and mental retardation. The study provides encouraging evidence on the effectiveness of multimedia design in the context of mathematics for the severely handicapped children at primary level.

 

Hamdi Erkunt’s study, titled Emergence of epistemic agency in college level educational technology course for pre-service teachers engaged in CSCL, aimed at identifying particular epistemic agencies in learning within a computer supported collaborative learning environment. He designed his experiments on the Knowledge Forum, an online discussion and sharing platform, and presented promising results from careful set-up of blended learning environments.  

 

Emrah Baki Başoğlu and Ömür Akdemir reported a comparison study on one of the hot topics in educational technology, mobile learning. Their paper is titled as “a comparison of undergraduate students’ English vocabulary learning: Using mobile phones and flash cards”. Their comparison revealed that using mobile phones as a vocabulary learning tool is more effective than one of the traditional vocabulary learning tools, namely flashcard.

 

I would like to thank all IETC 2010 presenters and the authors of this special issue, and the following reviewers whose help was precious to prepare this special IETC 2010 section in TOJET: Ahmet Eskicumalı; Ali Şimşek; Andrew Sturc; Arif Altun; Aytekin İşman; Eralp Altun; Erol Karakırık; Fahriye Altınay; Ferhan Odabaşı; Feza Orhan; Gunizi Kartal; Hakan Tüzün; Harun Yılmaz; Işıl Kabakçı; Lee Tsi Moon; Murat Ataizi; Mübin Kıyıcı; Özcan Erkan Akgün; Rauf Yıldız; Sadi Seferoğlu; Servet Bayram; Şirin Karadeniz; Tufan Adıgüzel; Vincent Shi; Yavuz Akbulut.

 

Hopefully the works reported in this issue will, at least partially, reflect state-of-the-art on practice and theory, and open new avenues for arguments and research in the field.

 

All the best

Yavuz AKPINAR (Guest Editor)

July 2010