Stephen Downes

I have long been fascinated by the observation that the fields I cover here are composed of what might be called 'communities of communities', that is, clusters of writers and practitioners that tend to coalesce into smaller cooperative networks while still being connected to the wider community. This article (29 page PDF) in Higher Education both embraces and resists that idea when it comes to a history of its own contents. It wants to be a systemic review, but the data don't coalesce into a single overarching theme. We see an ebb and flow of ideas and concepts, along with the citation networks of practitioners that swirl around them. "The early 2000s saw... the onset of institutional and methodological transformation... 2006-2015... indicates a shift towards macro-level analyses, emphasising structural, political, and social dimensions of higher education... 2021-2025... suggests a renewed orientation towards measurement, pedagogical modelling, and teacher-centred research." (p.s. the diagrams could have used much tighter editing; the headings of table 2 are incorrect, the hierarchical structure of Figure 3 is masked by lines flowing for no reason behind blue circles, the prominent (and hyphenated) 'higher-education' in the word cloud is suspicious, and the flow from concept to concept in Figure 7 appears to be arbitrary).