Michael Henderson

• PhD
• Professor at Monash University (Australia)

The much-discussed potential of ‘technology-enhanced learning’ is not always apparent in the day-to-day use of digital technology throughout higher education. Against this background, the present paper considers the digital devices and resources that students engage most frequently with during their university studies, what these technologies are b...

Digital technologies are now an integral aspect of the university student experience. As such, academic research has understandably focused on the potential of various digital technologies to enable, extend and even ‘enhance’ student learning. This paper offers an alternate perspective on these issues by exploring students’ actual experiences of di...

It is not uncommon to find that educational technology publications are under-theorized or uncritical of adopted frameworks. In many cases the literature is simply descriptive with only passing reference to an analytical or theoretical construct. This condition is particularly evident in the use of “community of practice” (CoP) in educational techn...

Social media, such as social network sites and blogs, are increasingly being used as core or ancillary components of educational research, from recruitment to observation and interaction with researchers. However, this article reveals complex ethical dilemmas surrounding consent, traceability, working with children, and illicit activity that we hav...

This article addresses a critical gap in international research concerning digital literacies and empowerment among adults who are English as an additional language (EAL) learners. In the Australian context, where digital communication and services are embedded in all aspects of life and work, proficiency in digital literacies, including advanced t...

Over the last few decades, the rise of educational technologies has disrupted educational practices within universities. Routinely, edtech enterprises have received criticism that their product development is more aligned with service provision of software rather than pedagogically oriented products. This paper explores collaborative and contentiou...

In this editorial for the special issue on Beyond Western Notions of Creativity in Education, we provide an overview of six articles that challenge the normative ontological, epistemological, and methodological underpinning of creativity research and practice in education. This special issue aimed to interrogate and problematize the notion of creat...

This report presents the findings of the research project that investigated attitudes to and the use of generative AI in the SEE program, and presents data taken from educational leaders, teachers and students.

Research demonstrates that assessment feedback created using audio, video, and screencast recordings can offer advantages over text-based feedback. However, the majority of research and experience in this domain has largely been limited to a single disciplinary or cohort context. This project aimed to empirically investigate if recorded feedback (i...

Emerging research points to the importance of developing the capacities of teachers to help their students to be creative risk takers and to learn from productive failure. Facilitating this creative risk taking in learners has been shown to require expertise and a degree of risk taking on the part of both teachers and educational leaders. This arti...

The importance of digital literacies for adult language learners from migrant and refugee backgrounds has been widely recognized. However, there is relatively limited conceptual and practical guidance for practitioners. To address this concern, we developed a pedagogical framework and a practical guide for teachers in the Adult Migrant English Prog...

Digital literacies are critical for adults from migrant and refugee backgrounds as they settle in a new country. However, institutions, leaders, and teachers often feel uncertain about how to teach digital literacies. Using the notions of digital literacy practices and assemblages, this article reports on a qualitative case study and explores how 3...

Technological change, the use of large data sets in evaluation and decision-making and the impact of existing and emerging applications of artificial intelligence (AI), is becoming increasingly important in education across contexts and disciplinary areas. At the same time creativity is lauded internationally as essential to 21st century skills and...

Playgroups are a unique form of early childhood education and care provision involving children and their adult caregivers attending and participating in shared play. Playgroups are known to promote positive social and educational outcomes for children and adult caregivers (e.g., parents, carers, or kinship members), however, the playgroup research...

This paper reports on the first phase of a broader study into effective design of instructional video. While instructional videos are increasingly popular as learning objects, increasingly easy to create by any educator, and have been shown to support effective learning as well as being scalable and re-usable, there is a lack of clarity about what...

In our 2020 JTATE article we proposed using Bruner's (1996) frame of folk pedagogies to consider pedagog-ical approaches suited to synchronous digital online learning in pre-service teacher education in COVID-19 times. We argued for the need to move beyond outdated pedagogies long-used in teaching practice and often oriented to face-to-face instruc...

Instructional videos are increasingly part of the teaching practices of educators across all sectors. The most common theoretical lens used to design and evaluate instructional videos has been to apply principles emerging from the cognitive theory of multimedia learning. However, these principles have been largely developed from research using inst...

Background The rapid globalization along with the growing trend of openness and sharing approach enabled widespread of digital technologies all over the world. However, we can still find differences between countries in technology use and perceptions of usefulness for learning. Understanding students' use of educational technology and their percept...

This paper identifies the shared features of provision in exemplar school playgroups defined using the social capital concepts of bonding and bridging relationships. Relationships promote capabilities amongst people, with play a known capability for advancing children's developmental and educational outcomes. By attending to the bonding and bridgin...

Research indicates that effective learner-centred feedback requires learner agency, impact and sensemaking. While scholars are focusing on supporting agency and impact, limited research has addressed sensemaking. This is problematic, because if learners fail to understand feedback, impact is likely to be reduced. In response, this study examines (n...

This paper examines the evidence of children's agency in research about infants, toddlers and technologies. It finds that an implicit reliance on technological determinism as a theoretical perspective for positioning technologies relative to young children's development tends to shape research in terms of understanding the impact of technologies on...

Emerging research points to the importance of developing the capacities of teachers to help their students to be creative risk takers and to learn from productive failure. Facilitating this creative risk taking in learners has been shown to require expertise and a degree of risk taking on the part of both teachers and educational leaders. This arti...

There is an emerging body of research about the importance of creative risk-taking and productive failure in classroom teaching across discipline areas. However, teachers’ confidence in engaging with these pedagogical ideas in their classrooms can be inhibited by perceived barriers, such as assessment demands, expectations by administrators, and th...

Due to recent conceptual shifts towards learner-centred feedback, there is a potential gap between research and practice. Indeed, few models or studies have sought to identify or evaluate which semantic messages, or feedback components, teachers should include in learner-centred feedback comments. Instead, teacher practices are likely to be primari...

Student agency is often mentioned as a key feature of feedback practices. Commonly, the concept of agency is used to refer to students' active role in the process of seeking, receiving, generating and acting upon feedback information. However, the notion of what student agency means is often taken for granted and rarely elaborated. The feedback lit...

Teaching and Digital Technologies: Big Issues and Critical Questions helps both pre-service and in-service teachers to critically question and evaluate the reasons for using digital technology in the classroom. Unlike other resources that show how to use specific technologies – and quickly become outdated, this text empowers the reader to understan...

Internationally, creativity is a widely discussed construct that is pivotal to educational practice and curriculum. It is often situated alongside technology as a key component of education futures. Despite the enthusiasm for integrating creativity with technologies in classrooms, there is a lack of common ground within and between disciplines and...

This article is a narrative inquiry about the implementation of creativity, creative risk taking and productive failure in six international contexts. There are many insights offered for the implemntatiojn fo creatvity, risk taking and productive failure in educational contexts.

Adults who educate and care for young children are exposed to mixed-messages about what is in the best interests of young children in digital society. Such mixed-messaging makes adult decision-making about technology use in the best interests of young children hard to achieve. This project addresses this problem by working with leading organisation...

Current conceptualisations of feedback contend that it should be a learner-centred process. In practice, however, text-based feedback comments from teachers are a convenient and common source of feedback information, despite appearing to be contra-indicative of learner-centred models. This raises the question of how teachers can tackle the design o...

In this paper we explore and challenge the trajectory of research scholarship in the area of Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK). In doing so we adopt the position, as elaborated in Harris et al.’s (2017) editorial, that TPACK research is in need of addressing two key questions: What do teachers need to know in order to integra...

YouTube hosts a vast catalogue of instructional videos that are increasingly used in formal education contexts. Teachers regularly use YouTube to select videos for students, but the processes they use to select these resources have been understudied. This study explores how teachers search for videos, and the role of YouTube’s complex algorithm in...

In the COVID-19 shift to online education, many teacher educators have sought out video conference technologies (such as Zoom) aiming to replicate traditional classrooms online. At face value, synchronous video appears to offer more immediate replicability of existing f2f synchronous teaching. However, moving pedagogically from one medium to anothe...

This article is an ontological investigation of the term creativity, to suggest a model that infuses key philosophical and critical perspectives. This article proposes that creativity has three modes of existence or ways of being in the world: the Visceral (embodiments), the Ideational (mind and conceptual), and the Observational (appreciation, cri...

Over the last decade the deployment and use of learning analytics has become routine in many universities around the world. The ability to analyse the way students interact with technology has demonstrated significant value for providing insights into student learning and there are now a wide range of uses for learning analytics in education. From...

Digital recordings can be an efficient method of providing feedback comments to students; however, the vast majority of empirical studies have focused on tertiary contexts. In response, this article presents a mixed-methods survey study of secondary students’ engagement, preferences and perceived impact of digitally recorded feedback. Participants...

The bibliometric data in this editorial provide readers with information about the journal’s publication, review and article access statistics, the articles attracting the most interest over the past year and the citation performance of the journal.

There has been a noticeable rise in the use of, and research into, educational videos in tertiary education in the past decade. This is due in no small part to the reduction of expensive barriers to their production and storage, and an increase in access to streaming services that make videos playable anywhere, anytime. Research into educational vi...

Despite an increasing focus on assessment feedback, educators continue to find that simply replicating an effective feedback practice from one context does not guarantee success in the next. There is a growing recognition that the contextual factors surrounding successful practices need to be considered. This article reports on a large-scale mixed...

There is an increasing focus on notions of feedback in which students are positioned as active players rather than recipients of information. These discussions have been either conceptual in character or have an empirical focus on designs to support learners in feedback processes. There has been little emphasis on learners’ perspectives on, and exp...

This chapter offers a useful overview of the purpose, development and structure of this book on feedback impact. It begins by touching on the reason for this book and then provides an outline of the process of how the editors and authors worked together to break new ground. We then explain the structure of the book—describing the five parts: feedba...

In contemporary higher education, learner behaviour is increasingly traced by digital systems. As such, there is a strong potential for data mining over time to track and represent learner actions in the context of their assessment performance. This chapter explores how learning analytics can assist educators to design impactful feedback processes...

This chapter focuses on influences, affordances and challenges for teachers in designing for (and identifying) feedback impact. We propose four key questions that need to be asked: Do learners know the purpose of feedback and their role(s) in it? Can learners make sense of the information? Can learners take action? What effects should we be looking...

This chapter discusses researching feedback inputs and processes to examine effects. Specifically, we promote a research agenda that contributes an understanding of how feedback works, for particular learners, in particular circumstances through research designs that take account of theory, occur in naturalistic settings and focus on students’ sens...

This chapter offers new insight regarding the theoretical, methodological and practical concerns relating to feedback in higher education. It begins with the construction of a new definition of feedback. We explain how feedback is a learner-centred process in which impact is a core feature. The chapter then explores the reasons why identifying, let...

Feedback can occur before and after assessment submission, but needs to be useful in order for students to improve their subsequent performance. Arguably, undergraduate students, and particularly international, online and new students, are especially in need of feedback to effectively engage in academic and disciplinary expectations. Therefore, thi...

Creativity is now increasingly understood as a fundamental component of a 21 st Century framework for education. It is important for learning, such as in problem solving, as well as growth, innovation, and wellbeing of individuals and society. As a consequence teachers are increasingly being asked to teach for creativity. However, risk taking is on...

Assessment feedback is one of the most important components of the learning process. However, student and educator dissatisfaction with feedback practices continues to remain a significant problem in higher education. To better understand the barriers to effective feedback, the present study explores feedback challenges identified by 3807 students...

In this editorial we present the bibliometric data and explain the new Creative Commons license being adopted from Volume 36. The bibliometrics include the journal’s publication, review and article access statistics, the articles attracting the most interest over the past year and the citation performance of the journal.

Assessment feedback is increasingly being provided in digital modes, from electronic annotations to digital recordings. Digitally recorded feedback is generally considered to be more detailed than text‐based feedback. However, few studies have compared digital recordings with other common feedback modes, including non‐digital forms such as face‐to‐...

Considering the political environments of Australia and the United States, the authors discuss the disconnect between policy and the practical needs of educators for creativity in the classroom.

This book asks how we might conceptualise, design for and evaluate the impact of feedback in higher education. Ultimately, the purpose of feedback is to improve what students can do: therefore, effective feedback must have impact. Students need to be actively engaged in seeking, sense-making and acting upon any information provided to them in order...

Educational technology research, like all education research, is dominated by explicit or implicit claims of causation. The dominance of cause-effect models in research is not surprising, and for many it is unnoticed and unquestioned. However, regardless of the cause-effect model being applied or the methodology in measuring it, we are unable to de...

In this article, we consider the benefits and challenges of enacting creativity in the K-12 context and examine educational policy with regard to twenty-first century learning and technology. Creativity is widely considered to be a key construct for twenty-first century education. In this article, we review the literature on creativity relevant to...

While carrying ‘Australasia’ in its name, our journal aims to achieve a strong global presence in the English-speaking world. In this editorial we examine data collected by our journal management software OJS to ascertain the outreach of AJET beyond its Australasian borders. We look at data concerning AJET’s readership, submissions, authors, and re...

Feedback practices represent a significant investment in resources and emotion for educators and students. While there are pockets of excellence, research continues to highlight that feedback practices cannot be simply parachuted from one context to another and be expected to work just as effectively. This paper presents twelve underlying condition...

This chapter provides a synthesis of recent research into how technology can support effective feedback. It begins by adopting a definition of feedback in line with recent advances in feedback research. Rather than viewing feedback as mere information provision, feedback is viewed as an active process that students undertake using information from...

Young children aged 4-5 years are online in rapidly increasing numbers. This is due to the accessibility of the internet afforded young children via touchscreen technologies. In Australian, the United Kingdom and United States of America, calls have been made for cyber-safety education to be provided for young children in their early childhood sett...

Since the early 2010s the literature has shifted to view feedback as a process that students do where they make sense of information about work they have done, and use it to improve the quality of their subsequent work. In this view, effective feedback needs to demonstrate effects. However, it is unclear if educators and students share this underst...

As our first issue for 2018 it is timely to provide some bibliometrics on the recent performance of the journal. The bibliometric data in this editorial provide readers with information about the journal’s publication, review and article access statistics, the articles attracting the most interest over the past year and the citation performance of...

This chapter adds to our understanding of learner engagement in terms of learner cognition while experiencing lessons in Second Life. The context of this research is in Higher Education second language acquisition. The methodology and implications are useful for others wanting to identify thinking processes students utilise during virtual world les...

Assessment feedback allows students to obtain valuable information about how they can improve their future performance and learning strategies. However, research indicates that students are more likely to reject or ignore comments if they evoke negative emotional responses. Despite the importance of this issue, there is a lack of research exploring...

This chapter brings recent critical thought from the field of educational technology to bear on the challenge of scaling up Assessment for Learning (AfL). Three different types of ‘scaling up’ are presented, illustrated through three different ‘technology-enhanced’ AfL approaches. Recent advances in providing feedback through audio, video and scree...

Research demonstrates that assessment feedback created using audio, video, and screencast recordings can offer advantages over text-based feedback. However, the majority of research and experience in this domain has largely been limited to a single disciplinary or cohort context. This project aimed to empirically investigate if recorded feedback (i...

AJET is the premier journal in Australasia which publishes manuscripts related to technology enhanced learning and teaching in post-secondary education settings. As a result the journal recieves a large number of submissions of which only 30% actually get sent to review. This editorial explains common and ultimately avoidable issues that result in...

This editorial reflects on some of the challenges of journal publishing in a context of increasing time pressures and accountability measures in academia. A particular focus is that of the demands on reviewers and the challenges of recognising their contributions. This editorial also introduces the eleven diverse papers that consitute the issue. Fi...

This paper explores how rich forms of digital media can be used to enhance assessment and feedback design in an online or blended delivery subject. This innovative design facilitates dialogical feedback processes by leveraging digital recordings created by educators and students. The aim of this design is for educators to explicate their evaluative...

This editorial summarises the bibliometric data regarding the journal’s publication, review and article access statistics, as well as the articles attracting the most interest over the past year and the citation performance of the journal.

The rapid change of technologies and the social and pedagogical practices that surround them mean that institutional procedures and the published field are often lagging behind. Those of us who work in the field of educational technology need to recognise that satisfying the requirements of institutional ethics compliance may not satisfy a broader...

Research reveals that effective assessment feedback is clear, specific, and sensitive to the individual. In practice, comments on assessment tasks are commonly provided in a text-based format, which can be perceived by students as ambiguous and impersonal. Digitally recorded comments, in the form of audio, video, or screencast recordings, may prese...

Feedback comments on summative assessment tasks are an important part of students' learning experience. Recently, researchers have noted that digitally recorded comments can be beneficial for both students and educators. This paper compares the clarity, usefulness and satisfaction of digitally recorded and text-based feedback comments produced by 1...

A recurring theme in the criticism of research relating to educational technology is that the field is swamped by descriptive studies. This work often does not provide for generalisation to population or theory, and rarely adds to our understanding of how the educational technology application or practices can be understood in terms of other contex...

Young children from around the world are accessing the internet in ever increasing numbers. The rapid increase in internet activity by children aged 4–5 years in particular is due to the ease access enabled them by touchscreen internet-enabled tablet technologies. With young children now online, often independently of adult supervision, the need fo...

Advancements in technology have increased preschool children’s access to the Internet. Very little research has been conducted to identify pre-school-aged children’s understandings of the Internet and ramifications of being ‘online’. Without an understanding of children’s thinking about the Internet, it is difficult to provide age- and pedagogicall...

Universities generate a mass of data related to students and the courses that they study. As such, ‘data work’ using digital technologies and digital systems is integral to educational administration within higher education. Drawing on in-depth interviews with administrative and managerial staff in an Australian university, this article examines th...

In this editorial Prof Barney Dalgarno reflects on the changes of AJET over the last three years. In doing so he offers a rough analysis of the extent of volunteering by editors and reviewers and makes a plea for authors to consider if they should or could contribute more.

This article explores the digital technologies that taught postgraduate students engage with during their studies, what these technologies are used for and how useful they are perceived to be. The article draws upon data gathered from a survey of 253 masters and postgraduate diploma/certificate students across two universities in Australia. Analysi...

We applaud the work in educational technology innovation and research that adds to our understanding of how technologies can improve the teaching and learning experience within well-defined learning systems. However, we also see a potential for critical research around digital technologies in relation to higher education as a system. In this edutor...

A digital disconnect perspective is founded on an assumption that technology use in the home is frequent, creative and generative, and that technology use in the early childhood centre should be the same as that found in the home. However, such arguments divert our attention from understanding the nature of the setting and thereby from an understan...

In this editorial we provide updated bibliometric data to provide readers with information about the journal’s publication, review and article access statistics, the articles attracting the most interest over the past year and the citation performance of the journal. We also introduce the diverse papers contained within the issue and welcome a new...

Large quantities of data are now being generated, collated and processed within schools through computerised systems and other digital technologies. In response to growing concerns over the efficiency and equity of how these data are used, the concept of ‘open data’ has emerged as a potential means of using digital technology to democratise data ac...

This project was designed to contribute to the evidence base that identifies how technologies are actually being used successfully and effectively in universities. Specifically, this project was tasked with addressing the question ‘What Works and Why?’ Therefore, the project focused on the following key issues: ISSUE #1 - What is the current impact...

Part B provides 10 Case Studies from the Office for Learning and Teaching Project - What works and Why? Understanding successful technology enabled learning within institutional contexts

In this editorial we report on a workshop of editors of educational technology and open and distance education journals held in Barcelona, Spain in June of this year, attended by Barney Dalgarno on behalf of the AJET editorial team. Some of the key issues discussed during the workshop included editorial processes, author services, sustainability of...

Teachers want their lessons to be enjoyable, immersive, productive and full of learning. In this regard, digital games have everything we want. Successful digital games maintain players’ attention, require them to solve problems, acquire new knowledge and learn new skills. Moreover, despite the considerable amount of learning, emotional investment...

In the past fi ve years young children's access to and usage of the internet has burgeoned, mostly due to the availability of internet-enabled, touch-screen and mobile technologies. While this creates exciting learning opportunities for young children, internet activity in this age-bracket raises several issues of practical, research and pedagogica...

Teaching and Digital Technologies: Big Issues and Critical Questions helps both pre-service and in-service teachers to critically question and evaluate the reasons for using digital technology in the classroom. Unlike other resources that show how to use specific technologies – and quickly become outdated, this text empowers the reader to understan...

In this editorial we discuss the increasing interest in mixed methods approaches to educational research generally, including educational technology. In recent years AJET has seen an increase in the submission of research using mixed methods approaches. Mixed methods are attractive to many researchers because they have the potential to provide both...