Digital Literacy and its Relevance to Comparative Education Researchers: Outcomes of SciVal Analytics

Oksana Chigisheva,Svetlana N Litvinova,Yuliya V Chelysheva,Anna G Akhtyan,Anna Dmitrova,Elena Soltovets

doi:10.29333/ejmste/11183

Abstract

Digitisation is a multidimensional phenomenon having direct and indirect impact on all aspects of human activity. The sphere of science and research, especially comparative education research, is being inevitably affected. The dizzying pace of socio-economic changes complicated by COVID-19 pandemic made it obvious that we are dealing with the digitisation of shock, rather than phased, character. The article states the lack of serious scientific reflection on the currently witnessed “shock digitisation” of science, complicated with growing digital illiteracy of researchers. The latter is demonstrated through rigorous literature review and SciVal Scopus analytics. The article is concluded with the idea that the field of comparative education research requires future profound rethinking of assumptions and agenda priorities in several aspects. They include general qualification requirements for modern comparative education researcher and comparative research procedures, functional and digital literacy of comparativists, changes in their research career potentials and prospects.

Highlights

The 21st century is characterized by profound digitisation of all spheres of human activity directly affecting science and education
The findings suggest the need for developing new digital skills emerging as a result of the growing requirements to comparative education researchers working in the context of “shock digitisation” and Open Science
The need for the digital transformation of science and education is considerably mainstreamed both at the government level and at the level of scientific communities and associations

Summary

Introduction

The 21st century is characterized by profound digitisation of all spheres of human activity directly affecting science and education. General requirements for research procedures, skills of modern researchers and the level of their functional and digital literacy are increasingly modified by external factors (Galchenko et al, 2020; Gimaliev et al, 2020; Tugun et al, 2020; Zyubina et al, 2019) They include internationalization and globalization of science and education, rapid development of Open Science, emergence of citizen science phenomenon, boom of digital pedagogy, etc. A. Toffler (1971) gives a vivid characteristic of the 21st century researchers They live in the era of the information and postindustrial society and must be learning continuously: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn”

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