Call for Manuscripts: TechTrends History Column
- Open Access
- 25.09.2025
- Column: History
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Focus of the TechTrends History Column
The history of educational communications and technology has profoundly shaped today’s field. Understanding this past is essential not only for honoring it but also for guiding future practice, research, and technology use. The TechTrends History Column explores historical issues, technological developments, and research methods that have influenced educational technology and continue to inform practice. By connecting past and present, the column highlights how history offers lessons and perspectives for contemporary educators, researchers, and practitioners.
Each article should show why history matters, demonstrating how technologies, trends, and figures shaped today’s learning landscape. Contributors are also encouraged to discuss the methods used to uncover and preserve this history, ensuring its accessibility for future generations.
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Why Does History Matter?
The history of educational technology is not a static record but an evolving narrative that informs current and future practice (Clark-Stallkamp et al., 2022). Understanding the origins and trajectories of technologies and ideas allows us to make more deliberate choices about their use in learning contexts.
This column provides a space to engage with history in ways that directly shape the future of educational technology. Submissions may examine innovations, figures, or research approaches, but all should connect historical insights to present-day relevance and implications for the future.
We invite researchers, educators, instructional designers, historians, and especially graduate students to submit manuscripts that meaningfully engage with the history of the field, drawing clear links between past developments and current or future research and practice.
Manuscript Guidelines
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Manuscripts should be 900–1200 words (excluding references).
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Use Times New Roman, 12-point font, and double-spacing.
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Follow APA7 format for references and citations.
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Submissions should be sent to Heather Leary (heather.leary@byu.edu) and Rebecca Clark-Stallkamp (clarkreb23@ecu.edu), with the subject line: "TechTrends: History Column Submission."
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Potential Topics for the History Column
We welcome a wide variety of topics related to the history of educational technology, including but not limited to:
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Historical Issues and Technologies: Analyze key milestones (e.g., magic lanterns, early media, LMSs) and their continuing relevance to educational technology.
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Research Methods in History: Examine approaches such as archival study, oral histories, or digital humanities for uncovering and preserving the field’s past.
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Early Narratives: Consider the influence of military training or ancient learning theories on the development of instructional technologies.
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Practitioner Design: Design examples and engagement with historical issues, museums, or organizations
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Critical Perspectives: Revisit historical narratives through new lenses, highlighting overlooked contributions or systemic barriers.
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Pedagogical Shifts: Trace the evolution of instructional approaches, from early methods to contemporary trends and cycles of innovation.
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Transformative Technologies: Investigate the impact of once-groundbreaking tools such as film, radio, television, computers, LMSs, MOOCs, or social media on educational practice.
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Trends and Innovations: Explore historical foundations of current movements such as OER, makerspaces, blended learning, and online education.
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Historical Moments: Focus on a pivotal year (e.g., 1989), identifying the innovations, debates, and lessons that continue to shape the field.
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Archives and Professional History: Highlight the role of institutions and collections (e.g., NIU, Blackwell Museum, AECT Archives) in preserving and advancing the history of educational technology.
Examples of Past Articles
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Armstrong, L., & Tawfik, A. (2023). The history of robotics and implications for K-12 STEM education. TechTrends, 67,14–16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-022-00816-8
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Barbour, M. K. (2021). The shift to distance learning: Tracing the roots of 100+ years of practice and opportunity. TechTrends, 65,919–922. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-021-00670-0
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Preble, B. (2020). Sliding into the past, projecting into the future: Examining the development and future of projector technology. TechTrends, 64,799–802. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-020-00548-7
Submission Deadlines
This column will be published regularly in issues of TechTrends, and we welcome submissions on a rolling basis. We encourage contributors to submit their manuscripts for consideration to keep the column dynamic, relevant, and aligned with the evolving field of educational technology.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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