PREFACE

HISTORY

This handbook began in 1993 at the annual convention of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, the professional association sponsor of the handbook. Lloyd Chilton, an editor for Scholastic and former editor for Macmillan Reference (publisher of the handbook series), had approached Stan Zenor about the prospects of producing a research handbook for our field. Stan deferred to the Research and Theory Division, which interviewed several people and selected me for the task of editing the book. Later that spring, at the annual Professors of Instructional Design and Technology conference on the shores of Lake Monroe in southern Indiana, a group of professors and students wrestled with the structure of the book for 2 days. After additional review by the associate editors and others, we agreed on a structure and set about imploring authors. Authors were selected for their reputation in the field and for their skills as researchers on the topics they were addressing. In some cases, we were not able to convince our first choices for chapter authors; however, for all chapters, we were fortunate to convince highly competent researchers and authors by late 1993.
For the next year and a half, authors presented detailed outlines for perusal by the editors and reviewers (listed in Acknowledgments), revised those outlines, wrote chapter drafts for the editors and reviewers, and again amended the drafts. The book was scheduled for completion early in 1996. The best-laid plans, however, went awry.

LIMITATIONS OF THE BOOK

Contemporaneity

The process for producing and publishing this book took longer than expected when Scholastic Inc. decided peremptorily in May 1995 that it wanted no more involvement with this project. Thankfully, Macmillan assumed responsibility for its publication, but the negotiations with two publishers, a professional association, and too many attorneys took more than 7 months. So the information in this handbook is already out of date. However, that is a phenomenon that has become a way of life in our field. The half-life of

new information has decreased a couple orders of magnitude (from decades to years to months and soon, no doubt, to weeks). While no book can be completely contemporary because of the print publication process, we made every attempt to make this one as contemporary as possible. During the transition of publishers and the resulting production hiatus, several authors took the opportunity to reflect once again on their work and to add the latest references and polish their manuscripts. Their efforts are greatly appreciated.

Comprehensiveness

Reviewing any field of research is a daunting task. Educational communications and technology is no exception. The thousands of studies that have been conducted and reported in various forms required amazing analysis and synthesis skills on the part of the authors. Deciding which studies to report, which to summarize, and which to ignore has challenged all of the authors in this book. The length, complexity, and detail of these chapters vary because of the quantity and quality of the research available. Chapter 11, on television research is, for instance, the longest (and one of the best written) in the book by far. Yet the authors cited only a fraction of the television research that has been reported. An exegesis of all of the research in our field would have required a book several times the length of this one. Not only would writing it have been a daunting task, reading would have been, as well. All of the chapters provide excellent overviews of their research domains and provide numerous avenues for continuing your research.
It will be easy to find omissions, important topics, or technologies that are not addressed in the book. Some were accidental, others intentional, and others necessary. For instance, we had intended to include chapters on film, programmed instruction, policy research in technology, and motivation and instructional design. These all represent important theoretical or technological foundations of our field, but we were unable to produce publishable chapters within the time restraints. Film and television were initially linked in Chapter 11. It became necessary, for reasons of sanity maintenance, to delete the film section. Within chapters, authors may have missed what you believe to be an important topic. Rest assured that we, the editors, coaxed as much out of the authors as they were able and willing to give. In any field, a definitive source is impossible, first because we are human and second because a field such as ours is changing so rapidly that a definitive source would remain definitive for only a matter of minutes.

FORMAT OF THE BOOK

You will notice that the headings in this handbook are numbered in a hierarchical manner. Opinions vary on the virtues of such a numbering system. Let me explain our reasoning. A handbook should be more than a static description of the state of the art. It should be a dynamic, working document that facilitates knowledge construction and problem solving for the readers. It should also reflect both the complexity and the interrelatedness of the field. To that end, many of the authors and I have worked to identify associations and relationships among the topics and methods described in this book. You will find references (e.g., "see 23.4.2"), distributed throughout the book. These references refer the reader to another section in the book about the same topic. We do not pretend that we have identified all or even a majority of the associations. Rather, we have provided a starting place. There are numerous inferences, implications, and associations that can yet be produced between all of the chapters. The more links that we can find as a profession, the more integrated our field becomes. The most usable document may have been a fully linked hypertext with typed links. However, I believe that the most meaningful links are the ones created by the user, so here is my own recommendation for studying this book: Create your own typed, hypertext links, and assemble them into some sort of link structure, either text based or computer mediated. Since we could not embed HTML code into this printed text (I believe that the handbook would be most useful in electronic form), we embedded references in the form of heading numbers.

USE OF THE BOOK

This is a handbook, not a novel. I would seriously doubt that many people will want to sit down and read it from cover to cover. Rather, it will be used to familiarize students and researchers with a domain of research in our field prior to beginning their own research. Or it may function as a handbook for selecting research topics or methodologies or for reflecting on proposed topics or hypotheses. The editors implored the authors to go beyond a review of research in a domain, evaluate prior research topics and methods, and suggest issues that need clarification. So, for the novice researcher in a domain, this book should provide some research direction as well as reflection. This handbook may also be used as a course text, probably not as a definitive text in a single course but rather as a reference source in some courses and a textbook in others. However you use this book, the reviewers, authors, editors, and I hope that it will help you to understand the issues better and formulate and execute better research, so that the next edition of this handbook may provide more answers and fewer questions. Best of luck!

DAVID JONASSEN, Editor