Introduction

In Latin America, that immense subcontinent delimited by the territory between the extreme north of Mexico and the extreme south of Chile, educational technology is a very recent field of knowledge and has generally advanced in accordance with what happens in the countries of North America and Europe. Having started its configuration as a distinct field of knowledge and research in the late 1980s, the evolution of educational technology as a field has been marked by significant heterogeneity and strong national contrasts. In spite of these differences, the story is defined overall by developments regarding the potential of technology to serve as an extension of human cognitive capacities, from a point of departure anchored relatively firmly in technical considerations to a contemporary scenario that seeks to identify subjective aspects related to the processes of teaching and learning.

In 1954, B. F. Skinner published The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching, a seminal work that outlined the theoretical framework in the field of educational technology and that had repercussions all over the world, including in Latin America. Skinner called for a drastic revision of pedagogical practice, which he says was focused excessively on teachers. He called instead for strategies based on Pavlov’s ideas involving stimulus response and positive reinforcement to promote changes in undesirable behavior.

As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, the term “audiovisual” was integrated into educational settings, especially in Mexico, Brazil, and Chile, to designate a new communication phenomenon whose channels were more audible or visual than written and printed. Thus, photography, maps, records, and radio began little by little to be used in Latin American school media. But such means of communication were not created specifically for schools. To compensate for a certain technological intrusion, schools sought to appropriate such means to make the teaching process more dynamic at a time when, in various Latin America countries, public policies were beginning to turn toward increasing the reach of public education. During this period, a process of engineering technological means specifically for education began and investigations carried out around them focused on the nature and the performance of technological products created to optimize educational relations. Influenced by technical North American approaches, it was assumed that, by using technologies, quality education could be guaranteed (Carr & Skinner, 2009). Thus, in 1960, Skinner proposed the development of technologies that could engage the student in an educational process in which s/he could receive continuous feedback on whether or not s/he answered a given question correctly. The first teaching machines were created in this context, corresponding to a new trend that would lead from audiovisual to educational technology. Such machines constituted the first technological product deliberately conceived, produced, experimented, and implanted in school environments, aiming to improve the process of education (Skinner, 1958).

In a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) publication, A. Lestage (1959) commented on the indiscriminate use of audiovisuals in educational settings and the need for applied research on their potential and their limits. Lestage recommended that these studies be guided by the psychology of approaches applied to education and social sciences (effects assessment, attitude changes, etc.) to achieve not only the best teaching practices mediated by these resources, but also to measure their actual impact on learning processes.

The great technological developments of the 1970s and 1980s promoted the structuring of mass media around the demands of mass communication. The educational potential of film, documentary, and television attracted the interest of educators and the audiovisual sector, gaining recognition as important auxiliary mediums for sharing knowledge. Audiovisual communication thus became a new means for expression for creativity, and also for teaching and learning. Still defined by the strong technical biases around educational technologies, research in education eventually came to express the idea that the visual was a kind of miracle cure for all kinds of educational problems. Audiovisual methods for teaching languages, classifications of devices based on their educational performance, films, and television programs explicitly intended for school use all followed from that central idea. Notable works from this period include Postlethwait, Novak, and Murray’s (1969) Audio-Tutorial Approach and Keller and Sherman’s (1974) Personalized System of Instruction. In 1970, the Commission on Instructional Technology called educational technology a process that transcends the pedagogical application of audiovisual media. According to that important commission, the researcher in the field of educational technology should examine the entire educational process and all elements of teaching and learning. Therefore, qualitative approaches were now seen as essential and contributed to shaping the field.

Gradually, both in Latin America and in the rest of the world, a new area of interest within the field of education emerged: to examine technological impacts on pedagogical mediation. Several researchers focused on the audiovisual phenomenon, assessing the advantages and disadvantages of the pedagogical use of the media. However, the concerns of researchers in that emerging field still largely focused on programmed teaching, stemming from the theories developed by Skinner, according to which the educational process should emphasize the reproduction of previously defined knowledge. For this, students needed to actively engage with educational content and receive reinforcements for their answers to proposed questions. This closed formulation of teaching required more rigidly defined learning objectives. These new methodological teaching processes attracted the attention of numerous scholars, including Gagné (1987), Bloom (1984), Mager (1975), and Gagné, Briggs, and Wager (1992). Important progress was made in the context of individualized education. Bloom expanded the work he began in 1956 on the identification of pedagogical objectives; furthermore, the audiovisual became an important part of the school arsenal and centers of pedagogical resources started to be introduced in primary and secondary schools.

Subsequently, individualized teaching, calling for more human pedagogy, focused on the student and his/her specific needs, allowing educational technology to become identified with a less hermetic process, aimed at designing and developing technological products not only for pedagogical purposes but also for education and training systems, methods of planning and structuring such systems, and analyzing educational needs and cognitive processes mediated by technologies. According to this perspective, the teacher is a cohesive element in the educational process, leading the student in learning while respecting the particularities and cognitive development of each individual. A strong constructivist connotation, influenced by the works of Piaget (1972), Vygotsky (1987), and Papert (1985), began to delimit the use of educational technology throughout Latin America, especially after Papert’s celebrated visits to Brazil, accompanied by Marvin Minsky, in 1975 and 1976. The constructivist approach, which requires qualitative research, emphasizes the construction of new knowledge and ways of thinking through the exploration and active manipulation of objects and ideas both abstract and concrete, and seeks to explain the learning process through the exchanges that the individual has with the medium.

In the early 2000s, education technology began to establish itself as an autonomous field with specific concerns such as personalized teaching, modular teaching, cooperative teaching, network learning, mobile learning, hybrid teaching, and so on. Given that digital information, communication, and expression technologies (DICETs) contribute to the reshaping of society, fueling the evolution of educational technology, research focused solely on media engineering and the way technology operates has given way to studies on the impacts of these tools and intelligence technologies (Lévy, 2004) on human cognitive processes. This encouraged, in short, new, largely qualitative reflections on what procedures might facilitate teaching, learning, and the educational process in general, shaping how research in educational technology is conducted.

It is therefore legitimate to evaluate the contributions of qualitative research methodologies in formatting this field of knowledge across Latin America today. This is the objective of this text, which consists of an epistemological mapping of production in this field, carried out through an analysis of popular scientific journals in the region between 2016 and 2017.¹

The aim is to present a state-of-the-field assessment of educational technology, a necessary overview for developing preliminary considerations about the role of this approach in the field at hand.

The Role of Qualitative Research in Shaping the Field of Educational Technology in Latin America

In order to establish itself as an epistemological component of the field of education, education technology evolved from an exclusively technical approach in the 1960s to a more humanistic approach in recent decades, attuned to the subjectivities arising from the teaching–learning processes mediated by DICETs. This evolution can most clearly be seen in the increasingly intense adoption of qualitative methodologies in this field of knowledge, which eventually pushed it beyond a mere subset of “engineering,” focused on the ceaseless invention of new products, apparatuses, and devices for educational purposes. In fact, as the data collected and presented in the section “Research in Educational Technology in Latin America: State of the Field” conclusively shows, the most recent research procedures are articulated through a study of the subjective character relationships of educational relations mediated by DICETs. This involves accounting for disparate points of view, social representations, individual and collective experience, behaviors, qualitative assessments of results and the evolution of educational relations, and so on.

The evolution of the concept “education technology” fits within a field of knowledge that encourages new methods of education which aim to thoroughly redesign the classroom through technological change (Kenski, 2012). This evolution can be traced to the theorizations of Lapointe (1991, who argued that technology is a process that should not be exclusively associated with the material products that it can generate. Thus, the concept of education technology must be set apart from the concepts of machine, instrument, and technological paraphernalia. The machine is just one of the outputs for educational technology processes, one of its products, but not its essence. Such a process can generate other important outcomes, such as new understandings, insights, procedures, models, methods, and strategies in which qualitative research has a foundational role. Lapointe’s emphasis on the intellectual process necessary for the creation and development of technological products and processes led Galbraith (1979) to associate educational technology with a mechanism for solving practical educational problems through the systematic application of scientific knowledge. According to this perspective, the researcher in the field of education technology serves as a link between the theoretical world and the practical world, identifying and analyzing problems and proposing solutions based on theoretical knowledge. Education technology thus becomes a process of knowledge identification with the aim of solving concrete problems related to learning and teaching (Santos, 1991). This, in turn, requires the adoption of varied research approaches.

While these trends involving education technology have been advancing in many parts of the world, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, Latin American education systems have only recently made a qualitative leap in embracing the potential of DICETs. Beginning at the end of the 20th century, the possibilities of the digital world became an increasingly viable reality across the region and school administrators saw in this advance opportunities to overcome chronic problems for education in the region, such as high levels of illiteracy, intense digital segregation, and a low quality of teaching, and thus achieve a democratization of quality public education through technology. Therefore, the adoption of education technologies in Latin American school systems has been closely related to the implementation of public policies at different levels of government (federal, state, and municipal), as noted in Tele educación en América Latina 2016 (5G Américas, 2016).

According to this research, the inclusion of DICETs in education took place in very different ways across Latin America, including attempts to provide every child with their own digital device, increasing connectivity in school networks, creating vast training programs for teachers and specific content for digital resources, implementing computer labs in educational institutions, and so on. On the other hand, the democratization of computer use and increased access to mobile devices with internet access, such as smartphones and tablets, have significantly influenced the perception of possibilities since, as in the entire Western world, a new digital culture has emerged, prompting a rethinking of established teaching methods and the way that students learn (Aguilar, 2012).

Without the scope and foundation of qualitative research, which gradually set the tone for research in educational technology, this field would have remained trapped in a vicious cycle of sterile technological production, with no real consideration of its impact, contribution, and catalyzing effects on innovative educational relations in line with a network society in full bloom (Castells, 1999). After all, as Gatti and André (2011) point out, in order to understand and interpret issues and problems in the field of education, it is necessary to resort to methodologies and techniques drawn from ethnographic studies, case studies, action research, analyses of discourse and narrative, memory studies, life history, and oral history. Specifically with regard to research on educational technologies, Chilean researchers Herrera, Fernández, and Seguel (2018) note that only qualitative research can provide holistic research based on the interpretation of concrete cases and through the use of concepts that allow other scholars to defend or challenge theoretical and empirical assumptions. On the other hand, the Colombians Arias and Lopes (2014) emphasize that the effective study of technology-mediated teaching and learning processes cannot happen if one does not understand the theoretical aspects underlying them and elucidate the roles of teachers and students. Similarly, Cuban researcher O’farrill (2010), in discussing strategies for introducing technology into the school system of his country, points out that only qualitative findings of the perceived impacts can provide the necessary scope for decision-making. In the Uruguayan context, Leite, Martínez, and Monteiro (2016) also embrace qualitative approaches to building an understanding of the effective potential of educational technologies in teacher training.

Along with several others, these works carried out in several Latin American countries point to a strong relationship between educational technology and qualitative research. No investigation into the conception, development, or implementation of DICETs can be complete without constructing a broad understanding of their potential limits and possibilities. Whatever the perspective of a given study, qualitative approaches are necessary to delineate the field of education technology, which continues to evolve in Latin America, as the articles analyzed in the section “Research in Educational Technology in Latin America: State of the Field” suggest.

Research in Educational Technology in Latin America: State of the Field

A survey of education technology research in Latin America reveals an evolving field that is still being consolidated, especially since it is a very recent area, marked by continuous and accelerated changes in the technological means and materials contributing to the teaching–learning process.

Considering that dissemination is the final stage of the scientific research process, analyzing this field through the main Latin American journals on technology and education can offer a structured picture of the approaches adopted in the area. It is important to emphasize that there are extremely few periodicals on the subject in this group of 20 countries, which makes the few thematic periodicals a space for researchers from several countries across the region to converge and enter into dialogue. There is a general large lack of articles reporting on good research, especially when compared to the research published in numerous journals in the same field in North America. Among the few journals that do exist, the most significant and regular ones mainly feature studies related to research and development (R&D), which, as the nomenclature itself indicates, are characterized by a dimension of academic research along with ideas of software development and engineering.

Indeed, R&D, which many researchers consider part of the field of education technology, calls for procedures for designing material or intellectual technologies (instruments or strategies) to be based on research processes related to teaching, learning, and the general context in which the material technologies will be used. This argument can be found in, among others, the various chapters in Design Approaches and Tools in Education and Training, edited by Van den Akker, Branch, Gustafson, Nieveen, and Plomp (1999), and Lapointe (1991). A two-pronged R&D approach requires at least two distinct methodological approaches: one to support the research process and the other to support the development process or to test the impacts and viability of the products or strategies developed. This explains the predominance of case studies, characterized by the elucidation of real situations where theories can be tested from practice and where questions of “how” and “why” can be addressed in order to advance in research areas with little or no previous study (Pozzebon & Freitas, 1998).

Of the 97 articles considered—published between 2016 and 2017 in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Ecuador, and Chile in the periodicals listed in note 1—a general concern on the part of the researchers in the field of education technology was to move beyond simply developing products, which would limit them to engineering problems. For example, the work of Brazilians Oliveira, Torres, Nunes, and Nakayama (2016) on information management devices in distance education learning is configured in the form of an exploratory research project that seeks to identify improvements that can be made through information technology at institutions of higher education that want to measure educational and administrative achievement based on the students’ evaluation of a blended course. Similarly, a study in Mexico carried out by Ortíz, Torre, Garcia, and Mendoza (2017) sought to analyze a situation of irresponsible Internet and mobile device use in academic spaces, associating it with negative effects in the teaching–learning process. The study by scholars Caldeiro-Pedreira and Aguaded (2017) also put forth a qualitative investigation based on an extensive bibliographical review of contents and interactions.

These examples demonstrate that education technology should be associated with the epistemological modus operandi of its field of knowledge and focus, that is, education, deeply demarcated through qualitative approaches. Such approaches contradict the quantitative schema of the hard sciences, which divides reality into measurable units, studying them in isolation, without broader considerations of dynamism and context.

Most articles search for ways to verify the effectiveness of technological devices and to find solutions to problems arising from the use of these devices in specific teaching and learning situations. For example, the Brazilian case study about the use of computers in schools in the state of Paraíba (Alves, Von Wangenheim, Rodrigues, Hauck, & Borgato, 2016) was organized in the form of a qualitative assessment of potential and limitation as perceived by those directly affected. Similarly, Mexican researchers Arjona, Bianchi-Rosado, and Vivas-Burgos (2017) performed usability tests in educational software through a qualitative approach called “cognitive pathway,” which consists of recording, through non-participant observation, modes of interaction between an individual and a technological device. Finally, in Argentina, the research of Morán (2017) is also a case study carried out through participant observation and interviews regarding the use of the “semantic web” in higher education situations.

Thus, an epistemology of education technology has taken shape in Latin America. Researchers and research subjects evolve together and gradually move toward a level of maturation, based on an understanding of the complexity of the educational process that demands an understanding of specific, unique, irreproducible situations in which educational devices are used. This implies consideration for the subjective dimensions of human relations and interactions in the educational process, mediated by material and intellectual technologies stemming from an education technology approach.

Much like in the rest of the world, research in education technology in Latin America evolved from discussions of engineering processes to educational processes. These processes, in turn, defined and guided studies in which material and intellectual technologies are situated, evaluated, and criticized. Thus, research in education technology carried out from a humanist perspective also considers the social, cultural, and institutional dimensions of the actors who define the context in which technologically mediated educational processes occur. This is the case, for example, in a study by Solis-Muñoz (2017) in Ecuador on the convergence of social networks and radio to set up an educational environment for informal education. In that study, the researcher approached his target audience through interviews that might reveal arguments, value judgements, valuations, and so on, in the search for clues to evaluate the convergence of media on which his work focuses.

In general, case studies predominate in the research on education technology in Latin America considered for this article, involving devices or strategies developed by the authors themselves or by third parties (evaluation, descriptive, experimental, or quasi-experimental studies) alongside studies geared toward understanding particular phenomena (phenomenological, hermeneutic, or ethnographic), with action research and participant observations, and with studies exclusively focused on theorization, documentary analysis, or diverse content. Examples include the theoretical study of Miños-Fayad (2017) carried out in Argentina with the goal of identifying structural elements of didactics of informatics and the Brazilian case study by Borges, Nichele, and Menezes (2016) aimed at understanding the potential of communities of practice for the continuous training of distance teachers. The latter is a true ethnographic study about a community of practice in innovation and education at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Rio Grande do Sul.

Studies published in the journals analyzed for this article can be placed on a continuum ranging from positivist approaches to more interpretive and heuristic approaches, in which the researchers invest both in observing educational situations mediated by technologies and in testing the impacts of certain technologies on teaching and learning situations. Qualitative research stands out in the works published in the most popular Latin American journals of education technology, which implies a gradual evolution of this field, initially focused on problems of media engineering and educational devices and now focused on the design and approach of education mediated by technology. The bibliographical production analyzed reveals that if the proposition of material and intellectual technologies—in which the engineering of educational mediums is inserted—lies at the heart of the field, qualitative assessments of its pertinence, its impacts, limits, and chances are also at the core of the field. From this perspective, studies solely focused on the engineering of educational media and the design of procedures that can positively contribute to the teaching–learning process become ineffective and lack vitality if not supported by qualitative research developed in real school contexts. From this perspective, several articles reveal that research in education technology in Latin America advances in three distinct and complementary directions.

On one hand, there are investigations conducted by researchers in the field of education interested in the pedagogical applications of DICETs and aimed at developing artifacts and procedures such as software, virtual learning environments, social networks, applications, massive open online courses (MOOCs), and so on. Such artifacts and procedures, due to the very epistemological nature of the field of knowledge to which they are directed, require that their creators, developers, and proponents conduct qualitative investigations. Such is the case of the engineering procedure of a MOOC for English teaching developed by the Argentines Domínguez, Rivarola, and Céliz (2016), conceived and developed through a classical approach to software engineering and tested using a case study along with a sampling of their target audience. The same scenario is presented in research developed in Uruguay (Czerwonogora, 2017) in which the research object is collaborative discussion forums, members of an AVA, to which qualitative techniques of content analysis were dedicated. Also addressing the MOOCs, but from a disruptive perspective, the Argentinian article by Vallejo and González (2017) is configured as a theoretical study that seeks to identify conceptual elements delimiting the area. Still in the field of studies of MOOCs, the Colombians Zambrano, Cano, and Presiga (2017) developed an analysis of student perceptions about their experience in this type of digital educational environment.

On the other hand, there are investigations in which qualitative approaches (case studies, participant and non-participant observations, ethnographic studies, critical studies, among others) are used to evaluate the pertinence of artifacts and procedures developed by third parties, that is, by researchers from other fields of knowledge, as in the case of Castañeda’s work (2016). This researcher from the field of computer science, also from Colombia, has used instrumental case study strategies to evaluate the relevance of a virtual learning object for science teaching. Another qualitative evaluation of existing devices carried out by the Brazilians Sondermann and Baldo (2016) consisted of action research in the area of inclusive educational design on the configurations of the cognitive tool Forum and the impacts on student–student, student–tutor, and student–teacher interactions. Also included in this category of qualitative investigations about existing devices is the theoretical study by Mexican researcher Ochoa (2016), identified as a sociocultural study.

However, a third path, which contains most of the studies analyzed for this article, indicates that the area of education technology is consolidated and based on investigative approaches in which the technological development and the qualitative evaluation of the technological product developed advance pari passu in the scope of the same research projects, by the action of the same researchers. This is the case of the study conducted by the Brazilian team composed of Reis, Rodriguez, Lyra, and Isotani (2017), who sought to expand the ontological structure of affective collaborative roles in CSCL (computer-supported collaborative learning). In this situation, the same researchers who developed the technological device through software engineering methodologies also tested it through a qualitative approach. This is also the case of research conducted in Argentina by Echeveste and Martínez (2016) to qualitatively analyze situations of DICETs being applied in learning and programming conceived and provided by themselves.

In sum, the context analyzed for this article, made up of the hundred or so articles published between 2016 and 2017 in periodicals from Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Mexico, and Chile dedicated to the field of education technology, indicates that this area has gradually evolved from having a strongly technical perspective, related to the engineering of technological devices, to a more humanistic perspective, increasingly associated with the epistemology of the social sciences and education itself, and characterized by qualitative analyses of the limits and possibilities of devices, resources, actors, situations, and so on. In this way, qualitative approaches appear inseparable from research in education technology. This inseparability also manifests itself in the research objects of the investigations reported in these journals, which make the same contributions to the qualitative research on education indicated by André and Gatti (2008) in their important text on the qualitative methods of research in education in Brazil: empirical studies of an exploratory nature on information management in educational situations, such as that of Brazilians Oliveira et al. (2016); content analysis of educational software programs such as Aguilar-Vera, Díaz-Mendoza, Ucán-Pech, and Güemez (2017); action research aimed at the experimentation of devices with specific audiences, such as the Argentine researcher Clerici (2016); bibliographical reviews in search of theoretical assumptions, such as that of the Brazilians Rodrigues and Oliveira (2017); or literature reviews and state-of-the-field construction on mobile devices, such as that conducted by the Ecuadorian researchers Humanante-Ramos, García-Peñalvo, and Conde-González (2017).

This scenario indicates that, especially from the 1990s, due to the explosive growth of the use of computers in schools and the popularization of the Internet, there has been increased demand for new understandings of the role of technology in education. The advent of mobile, sensory, and localization technologies has changed not only the way people interact with each other, but the educational possibilities of digital media, demanding a broader, qualitative understanding of educational phenomena mediated by DICETs.

Final Considerations

This article suggests that from these beginnings, the expansion of research in digital technology for educational purposes—especially in areas such as informatics and engineering—will increase interest in the field of education technology among the broader academic community, which, in turn, will increase interest in qualitative research. Future research should be defined by partnerships between researchers in the field of education and other areas of knowledge in order to develop further studies on the relationship between technology and education in a broad sense. In this way, we might obtain answers about new possibilities of hybrid teaching and learning with more diverse objectives.

Empirical studies on the uses and didactic strategies linked to technological resources in teaching–learning situations in virtual or face-to-face environments will require analytical approaches capable of revealing frames, subtleties, and subjectivities. Conducted by research groups composed of educators and scholars from many different fields, the research has been carried out, in most cases, by using mixed methods, that is, according to the presuppositions of qualitative and quantitative approaches. As a result, the focus of research in education technology has been largely guided by the search for contextualized understanding of a specific situation, the interpretive analysis of an educational process, rather than the mere quantification of data (Zanette, 2017). With this in mind, future research should be geared toward identifying new pedagogical strategies that may include emerging educational technologies for the training of teachers concerned with the educational process and able to use educational technologies as a means of teaching and not as learning purposes; for understanding the potential of the active methodologies that usually result from the use of technologies in schools; for the elaboration of curricula that, permeated by technological pedagogical strategies, form autonomous, participative, and critical citizens; for dealing with the new ways of teaching and learning that schools face every day.

Finally, it is important to emphasize that a significant part of the investigations carried out in the field of educational technology, as verified in the articles analyzed, have been carried out by researchers from other fields of knowledge, such as psychology, computer science, administration, natural sciences, and so on. This implies an important adhesion of these researchers to qualitative approaches, due to their epistemological interests, as evidenced throughout this article. In the Brazilian context, this multidisciplinary scenario of research in educational technology, more precisely in the field of distance education, was recently approached by Kenski (2017) and, in a way, points out very interesting research tracks for the advancement and consolidation of this field of knowledge, which should be guided by collaborative and interdisciplinary qualitative research. The origin of an important part of the 97 articles analyzed also indicates the same scenario in other Latin American countries, where researchers from different fields of knowledge invest in the field of research on pedagogical applications of TICE (in Portuguese, Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação na Educação, focusing mainly on projects of engineering of media for face-to-face and distance education. Now, recalling what we have already discussed about the three distinct and complementary directions in which research in the field of educational technology advances, it is to be assumed that the need to evaluate the efficiency of the developed media will require that these researchers undertake qualitative investigations with this specific purpose, without which the technological products developed will remain sterile and meaningless. We predict that there will be a significant amplitude of qualitative research in educational technology in Latin America in general.

Taken together, the articles analyzed for this text indicate that the future paths for qualitative research in education technology in Latin America are broad. These paths will be built through investigations whose main focus will be on processes and relationships between participants (human and technological) in teaching and learning situations. Research questions related to active methodologies, student protagonism, mobility with educational factors, collaboration, collective creation, social media, teaching personalization, interactivity, and interaction, among others, should be on the agenda of studies developed in the field of education technology by actors from different fields. In the same sense, future research should focus on urgent and crucial concerns with teacher training for the new educational realities mediated by DICETs.

We conclude that the epistemological evolution of this field, articulated around the pedagogical applications of DICETs, beginning from highly technical origins, has culminated in humanist approaches that provide the framework for education technology as a part of the social sciences and humanities. This evolution happened through the adoption of diverse qualitative methodologies, as we can see in the classification presented in Figure 1, elaborated from the evolution of the area of knowledge and theoretical frameworks of the articles analyzed for this text, which reflect recent scientific production and, therefore, elements of the state of the field on research in education technology in Latin America.

What we seek to sketch out in this figure is that the progress of investigations in education technology, necessarily articulated with investigations on the pertinence, the impacts, the limits, and the possibilities of developed technologies, happen through a gradual embrace of qualitative research. This comes about through the adoption of a wide variety of ways to build knowledge, ranging from case studies and action research, the majority of articles analyzed, to theorizing studies, to formulating critiques and standards, and to understanding reality objectives through their subjectivities, which are irrefutable components of the reality of a given situation.

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Figure 1. Theoretical approaches to education technology investigations.

In short, qualitative research, with its emphasis on the subjective character of the objects analyzed, with its consideration of particularities and individual experiences, with its extraordinary capacity to approach educational relations through minute details, using ethnographic, case studies, action research, life history, anthropological studies, and phenomenology, among other possibilities, has been setting the tone for studies in the field of education technology. This will undoubtedly continue to shape the future of this extremely dynamic and essential part of the field of education.