Educational informatics: an emerging research agenda

This paper discusses educational informatics as a research field and provides an overview of the scope of work in this, and closely related, areas by members of the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield. Current work in Sheffield focuses on the use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in universities and schools, seeking to understand the effects of using ICTs in educational practice on learners, teachers and learning support staff. It also seeks to develop practical knowledge of relevance to the design and facilitation of ICT-enabled learning environments. The paper highlights the interdisciplinary nature of this research, and discusses theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches that are being used by Sheffield researchers. It concludes by suggesting that library and information science has a distinctive contribution to make to the study of ICT-enabled learning, and that there is a need for further discussion within the literature of this emergent field of inquiry.