Personalization is one of the recurring themes in education and has occupied a large amount of specialised literature, since its appearance in the 1960s. A systematic exploration of the literature of the last 55 years (1960–2015) is presented and is intended to analyse which educational perspective underlies the customized environments or experiences proposed in the educational technology that is addressed in the literature. It is important to understand that this analysis is a very relevant challenge, if we want to understand what pedagogical approaches have been continuously developed and how and why we should consider their future. The results show a complete centralisation of experiences in technological developments, the majority of them focussed in Higher Education, as well as a lack of an explicit pedagogical perspective in the experiences analysed, especially those with greater impact. It also shows a shortage of in-house pedagogical material – developed in the light of this research, that evolves and makes an impact on the educational landscape.

Assembling New Toolboxes of Methods and Theories for Innovative Critical Research on Educational Technology

Digital literacy is a critical competence for empowering citizenship in a digital world. It has become a key element in teaching and learning across the different educational stages that has been addressed since the last decade of the twentieth century within the field of open, distance, and digital education. The literature so far has not agreed on a common definition, but multiple international, national, and even local, frameworks exist to foster digital literacy and to evaluate and certificate it, especially with a focus on educators and students in different educational levels, but also with the citizen perspective. These frameworks are reviewed in this chapter, along with the evolution and conceptualization of digital literacy and some strategies to foster digital literacy in different educational sectors, with a focus on the educator as a key player in this fostering action. The most remarkable challenges for developing digital literacy for teaching and learning include the same conception of digital literacy, which is multiple and situated, the digital divide and the actual consideration of digital literacy as a social practice. Being digital literacy a transversal competency nowadays, clear implications for education can be drawn, such as reshaping organizations to the digital conditions, thinking on digital literacy as a collective effort, and enriching the global discourse through diversity in debates.