Celebrating the Tenth Networked Learning Conference: Looking Back and Moving Forward

Abstract The chapters in this book are based on a selection of papers from the Networked Learning Conference 2016 which was the 10th anniversary conference in the series. In acknowledgement of the anniversary, the authors of this Introduction look back and reflect on past networked learning conferences with the aim to describe some general trends and developments in networked learning research as they emerge and fade out over the years. In order to do so the authors use the proceedings of each networked learning conference (from 1998 till 2016) as a compiled dataset. This dataset forms a text corpus that has been analysed with Voyant tools (Sinclair and Rockwell 2016) specifically designed for analysing digital texts. Voyant tools are used to generate a set of word clouds (Cirrus) in order to visualise networked learning research-related terms that feature most frequently in each set of proceedings and conduct a trends analysis of these terms to generate a visual representation of the frequencies of these terms across the proceedings over the years. The outcomes have been thematically organised around the following topics: learning theory (e.g. cognitivism, constructivism, social learning, actor network theory), learning environments and social media (e.g. LMS, MOOC, Virtual Worlds,
Twitter, Facebook), technologies (e.g. phone, laptop, tablet), methodology (e.g. quantitative, qualitative) and related research in the domain of e-learning (e-learning, CSCL, TEL). The findings are placed in their historical context to understand how research presented in the domain of networked learning has developed over the years and influenced our work. Towards the end of the Introduction, the two main
sections of the book are presented. The overview discussion of individual chapters is deferred to the Conclusion chapter.