Selected Styles in Web‐based Educational Research

When receiving this book for review, I was very excited about what the content might be in a publication titled Selected Styles in Web‐Based Educational Research. With nine main sections covering research and educational technology policies, Internet technology and educational research, case study educational research on the Web, action research with Web tools, experimental research on online teaching and learning, qualitative educational research on the Web, virtual ethnography and discourse and correlational research on the Web, this really seemed like a very promising publication for educators and research students in education.

The authors seem well qualified with a strong Canadian background (not necessarily a problem in this context). Each chapter starts with a list of learning objectives and an abstract, which is followed by the content and some form of conclusion. This takes on the form of student exercises, findings and a summary, and sometimes a checklist. Each chapter is concluded by a list of references and some actually include extensive lists of references which offer an excellent point of departure for the research student for further reading.

Well‐structured chapters and well planned and meaningful activities and stimulation are very important in a “textbook” type publication, especially in didactic contexts such as educational research. I was therefore very puzzled by some of the objectives that focused very strongly on lower order skills as well as the scope of some of these objectives (e.g. “define research style on the Web”, “list the elements in the diffusion of innovation theory”). Or another example: “summarise the author's rationale for using a particular theory”. At times I had the feeling that the authors relied very strongly on their personal experiences and preferences which is not necessarily wrong if clearly stated. If the publication is aimed at opening new horizons for education researchers focusing on Web research I would expect a much stronger academic undertone, linking personal experience and preferences to the wider field and research literature.

One chapter that in particular left me very puzzled as well as concerned about the quality of the publication/editing dealt with literature searching and the identification of search terms. The authors refer to codes used by databases. Over many years (since at least the early days of online and computerized databases), Library and Information Science literature explored the complexities of natural language and controlled vocabulary and practices of assigning indexing terms (the so called codes). Solutions to these are thesauri (showing relationships between terms as well as preferences for terms, e.g. recommended terms for forbidden terms). Longer informative abstracts have also been mentioned as solutions to identifying search terms to refine searches. The authors went to a lot of trouble to explain the use of “codes” in three databases, namely ERIC, Medline and PsychInfo… all having thesauri. There is no reference to any research in Library and Information Science except for one article by Spink and Xu (2000). Although they are key researchers in Library and Information Science, their work does not really apply to the problems of search vocabulary. What really concerns me is that it seems as if this chapter is supposed to offer a guideline on effective literature searching.

Quite a few typographical errors were spotted, for example pp. 2, 26, 64, 103, 109 and 110 (reference for Palmquist is missing).

The three page index for a publication of just under 500 pages is also really inadequate and poorly constructed. There are no cross references and no page ranges are indicated. For each entry there is only a single page number, for example “action research 146”, “artifact 180”, etc. I would expect that a renowned publisher such as Information Science Publishing will alert the author (editor) to such a serious shortcoming. Furthermore, Information and Library Science are the disciplines where back‐of‐book indexes are studied and perfected.

Although Selected Styles in Web‐Based Educational Research has potential in stimulating Web‐based educational research, I am a bit concerned about giving it a unqualified recommendation. I suggest that readers interested in purchasing the book also consult other reviews.