George Veletsianos advises researchers to focus not on technology but problems. His reasoning is that technology is always changing. The digital consumer is fickle: Today’s Facebook is tomorrow’s MySpace. As a result, Veletsianos suggests that platform-specific research may become irrelevant before it’s even completed.
Perhaps another way to study technology is to focus less on the “what” and more on the “how”. An example of this approach might be to study how people engage with technology, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tic Toc or Moodle. After all, they are all just a means of distribution of information. It may be valuable to look at these as a group and ask some questions: Why do they work? What keeps people engaged? What keeps them coming back, and why ultimately do they move on to a new platform?
Studying technology in this way may help us address some of the larger problems of education such as: how to increase student engagement, how to reduce cognitive overload, or how to reduce student drop-out rates.
I enjoyed your thoughtful post and these are good research questions!