Ibero-American research into educational technology as a vehicle for official recontextualisation (2019–2025). A quantitative study of three Spanish journals
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17398/1695-288X.25.2.35Keywords:
Educational Technology, Semantic Network Analysis , Pedagogic Device, Recontextualization, Academic Circuits, Generative Artificial IntelligenceAbstract
This quantitative study examines the structure of an Ibero-American academic research field on Education Technology, based on a corpus of 538 articles published in three regional journals indexed in the first quartile of Scopus —PIXEL-BIT, RIED and Educación XX1— between 2019 and 2026. The theoretical framework combines Basil Bernstein's theory of the pedagogic device —distribution, recontextualization (ORF and PRF) and evaluation rules, together with the concepts of classification, framing and vertical discourse— with Fernanda Beigel's concept of segmented academic circuits and the Ibero-American critical perspective on educational platformization. A multi-method design is proposed combining bibliometric analysis, semantic co-occurrence network analysis of keywords with community detection via the Louvain algorithm, rule-based lexical classification of methodological and discursive orientation applied to abstracts, and exploratory epistemological analysis using unsupervised clustering (K-Means) and Bernsteinian lexical classifiers. Results show a field with 9 conceptual communities articulated around a single hub-bridge (higher education), a markedly quantitative methodological distribution (60.8%) and instrumental discourse (61.7%), with marginal presence of critical traditions (5.3%) and almost total absence of theoretical production (0.5%). The emergence of generative artificial intelligence between 2024 and 2026 reorganizes the vocabulary and densifies the network without altering the recontextualizing structure or the formal grammar of the circuit.
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