E-learning Journal Recommendations?

Bound JournalsIn our white-knuckle ride through our fast-moving field, it seems we increasingly draw authority, information and inspiration from blogs and tweets and the like; while many aspects of the ‘traditional’ model of academic journal publishing have come in for criticism lately, or been called into question by developments in Open Access repositories and journals*, or advanced web search tools aimed at academics.

Nevertheless peer-reviewed and edited journals are still the places we must turn to for reports of considered, detailed, serious academic research. The VLEs and handbooks for each module on the MSc Programme abound with references to articles in academic journals about education, and the other areas touched on in our wonderfully catholic syllabus (technology, information and cognitive sciences, philosophy, etc): but I wondered whether there is anywhere a complete-ish list of journals that esteemed tutors and colleagues recommend most highly for news of cutting-edge and thought-provoking insights in the field?

For example: personally I found Innovate very interesting and useful in recent years, particularly as an open journal that doesn’t require any messing around with typical publishers’ journal ‘database’ interfaces. Seems, however, it is not being produced any more, alas (does anyone know why?). Not surprisingly ALT-J (“Research in Learning Technology”) is also rich with things up-our-street (and n.b. ALT-J issues more than 18 months old are freely available in ALT’s EPrints repository). From the library/information science community, Program is a journal that often contains research relevant to e-learning issues, particularly in HE.

That’s about my limit for specific journals I’ve actually engaged with as entire publications (like I have time to read all this stuff!) as opposed to following links to individual articles. But can anyone suggest other journals which should be at the top of an e-learning pro’s reading list?

Part of my motivation for asking this was rediscovering the excellent JournalTOCs service developed by Heriot-Watt, where you can create personalised, dynamic newsfeeds of the tables of contents from a huge range of academic journals. Maybe even, with a suitable short (or long) list, someone smart around here could create a JournalTOCs feed and plug it into a page or widget on this Hub?

Would love to hear your thoughts/recommendations.

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* Serendipitous clicking during the course of writing this happened to lead me to the JURN.org site,which I shall definitely be returning to.

10 thoughts on “E-learning Journal Recommendations?”

    1. Hello Roddy. Would I be right in thinking another institution could build something similar using the JournalTOCs API? BTW, are you allowed in here? I don’t want to be starting something NOTB!! 😉

    1. Thanks Sian, that’s a good list, I’m getting deja vu, maybe I saw it and forgot about it… But I also kind of wondered if individuals had any particular favourites or recommendations. Why do we engage with one journal over another – if we do – or are they just arbitrary containers for articles?

    2. Here’s a bit of lunchtime fun: this URL gets a feed of the TOCs of as many of the journals as I could find in JournalTOCs: you can plug it in to your Google Reader, Thunderbird mail client, WordPress widget or whatever you use to read newsfeeds, and in theory it will update automatically when new issues are published:
      http://tinyurl.com/rdmsceljtocsrss1
      (I may think of some other tricks anon.)

  4. Richard,

    Yes, another institution could build something similar using the JournalTOCs API, or you could get Santy Chumbe at Heriot-Watt to do it for you, as he’s already made the WattJournals service.

  5. Richard – some I’d go to first are probably:

    Computers and Composition
    Computers and Education
    First Monday
    Higher Education
    The Internet and Higher Education
    Journal of Computer Assisted Learning
    Learning, Media and Technology

    I also like the London Review of Education and Teaching in Higher Education which aren’t on the list. But these reflect a particular ‘take’ on the field, and the selection isn’t really driven by what the journal rankings say are the influential ones…

  6. It’s been a long time since I last read an article from one of the journals listed on the MSc’ E-learning journal list: I loved doing so during the Masters but the trouble with graduating is that it cuts one from the University library :-/

    I’ve been wondering whether there was any institutions that one could subscribe to in order to get access to such a broad range of E-learning journals: is there any way for graduates to subscribe to the University of Edinburgh’s library for instance?

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