Technology and educational ‘pivoting’ in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic : a collected commentary

Abstract

The present document presents 13 commentaries that address the broad topic of the special issue—Technology and educational ‘pivoting’ in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic—and, in some cases, specific articles from the issue itself. Since the launch of the journal in 2020, we have been explicit about our aspiration that Studies in Technology Enhanced Learning might serve as a vehicle for scholarly conversation (Bligh & Lee, 2020). The present “collected commentary” presents one such expression of that conversation, using a format, recently pioneered by journals like Postdigital Science and Education, which the present editors have recently found most useful (e.g., NLEC et al., 2021). We cannot claim to be the first to present such a collected commentary on this issue—we are certainly aware of the valuable contribution of Bozkurt et al. (2020)—but the format, which remains an uncommon one, does allow us to raise a number of points that are too often overlooked in the literature and to present disparate views on a number of common themes. Moreover, many of the themes raised here, such as the ongoing consequences of the pandemic ‘pivot’ for future developments, can benefit from being considered in a multi-voiced way and from the relatively rapid publication schedules that the present format allows. [excerpt]