Abstract:

In the last few decades’ research in all areas of knowledge have advanced at high speed. The area of education is no exception. New knowledge and trends are constantly being published. When we put together technology and education then the speed with which new research arises, accelerates due mainly to the eagerness that all educators and researchers have for new technologies to enhance the work of educators.

Later this year a more than 10-year project (2005/2016) called EUROMIME comes to a conclusion. EUROMIME is a European Master in Media Engineering for Education. It trains project managers in the field of design, development and implementation of educational and training programs resorting to computer mediated environments. It also trains researchers specializing in the study of the use of use of these technologies.

During this period all 135 EUROMIME students, coming from 33 different countries, produced a master's thesis that involved a research area in education mediated by technology. This paper reflects the trends of research in this area over the last decade.

In order to get a snapshot of the research produced, we collected all possible data from the dissertations produced by each student. We believe that these data will help us respond to our concern. We collected information such as the title of the thesis, keywords, mentor, abstract of the paper, all bibliography, etc.

After a lengthy information gathering process many interesting facts are emerging. In this paper we present some of the work done so far in relation to keywords. The keywords have been widely used in the literature to reveal the structure of knowledge.

To carry out this analysis we collected 740 different keywords in 135 dissertations’. After some standardizing work (plural / singular, different names for the same thing and minor errors - despite our intention to aggregate we tried to preserve, as much as possible, the original keywords defined by the authors) 525 different keywords remained. We found that there was a wide spread thereof by various authors, as 443 (84%) are unique words, that is, are only referred to by a single author. The 4 keywords mentioned more often by the authors were: ict (by 21% of the authors), social networks (9%), teacher training (8%), education (6%).

In an attempt to better understand the evolution of research themes, we performed a co-word analysis using the keywords and visualizing the results with social networking diagrams, so we can understand how they relate to different groups of words in the field of research. This in addition to a first analysis with a network with all keywords. We have analyzed the modifications of this structure in two periods of 5 years and then also annually.

The data, although primary, shows us an extremely interesting development of themes. It is clear in some cases as research in this area moves by fashions aggregated to new technologies as they come on the market.

Keywords:

Research in education, technology, social networking diagrams.