Editorial: A Message from the Editorial Team and an Introduction to the January-March 2013 Issue

Abstract

The authors are honored to be selected as the new editorial team for the journal and grateful to the TLT Steering Committee for giving us the opportunity to lead TLT for the next three years. The previous editorial team, led by Wolfgang Nejdl, shepherded the journal from its start to its current maturity, leaving it in an excellent state as a leading journal in the fi eld of learning technologies and e-learning. The journal now has an excellent flow of submissions. It has been able to reach an emerging community of researchers exploring innovative learning technologies and to attract excellent papers on a broad range of topics from many countries. The authors hope to continue this trend over the next few years while further expanding the journal's coverage. The next five years promise to be very exciting for researchers and practitioners in the area of learning technologies. The advancement of Internet and mobile devices further broadens the audience that can get access to modern learning technologies. The increased accumulation of learner data opens an opportunity for smarter, user-centered tools for learning approaches. The popularity of social technologies emphasizes the social dimensions of learning. All this stimulates a range of new and interesting developments coming from both industry and research labs - from massive open online courses to personalized iPhone learning apps. In addition, thanks to increased media coverage, prospective audiences have become more aware of these options and more eager to explore them. All this presents a challenge to any established journal in the field of learning technologies. One of our top goals as the new editorial team is to answer this challenge by ensuring a good coverage of important modern technologies and pedagogies. Among our first actions is to extend the Editorial Board and to plan special issues on a range of hot topics, such as social learning technologies and ubiquitous learning. The Call for Papers for the first of the planned special issues is already announced and the new Board members will be introduced in the next issue. For the current issue, we are pleased to introduce a collection of eight papers covering a range of topics.