Scholarly Writing

Looking back at the writing I produced throughout the Learning Technologies master's program, I can trace a clear shift — not just in the topics I explored, but in how I approached scholarly argument, theoretical grounding, and critique altogether.My first example, written for LTEC 5030: Foundations of Learning Technologies, examines the implementation of personalized learning in a suburban school district through the lens of Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation theory.When I began that paper, I was primarily focused on describing what personalized learning is and cataloging its benefits. But as I worked through the research, the more compelling question became: why do good ideas fail to spread? That pivot changed how I structured the entire argument. Rather than writing a straightforward advocacy piece, I had to engage seriously with barriers — teacher resistance, equity gaps in technology access, data privacy concerns — and use Rogers' five-stage adoption model as an actual analytical tool rather than a decorative label.

This paper taught me that scholarly writing in instructional technology requires synthesizing across organizational change theory, policy research, and classroom practice simultaneously, and that evidence is not padding — it is structure.My second example, a research article critique written for LTEC 5610: Analysis of Research in Learning Technologies, pushed me in a different direction entirely. Evaluating Mayes, Natividad, and Spector's (2015) conceptual piece on challenges for 21st-century educational technologists required me to shift from constructing an argument to interrogating one.I had to assess not just what the authors claimed, but how they substantiated those claims — and, in this case, where they fell short. Recognizing that an article can be professionally relevant and intellectually valuable while still lacking empirical rigor was an insight I had to work toward. Early in my academic writing, I tended to either accept or dismiss sources wholesale. This critique required something more nuanced: acknowledging strengths while holding the methodology accountable to research standards.Taken together, these two pieces reflect a progression from applying frameworks to questioning them. My topics shifted from macro-level innovation diffusion to close methodological reading, and my level of critique deepened considerably along the way. What stayed consistent was an interest in how technology gets embedded — or fails to get embedded — into real learning environments, and why that process is harder than it looks.Across both pieces, I also notice that my relationship to theory changed the most.

Early on, theory felt like a box to check — name the framework, move on. Now I find myself asking whether a framework actually illuminates something or just provides vocabulary for what I already thought.That skepticism, I think, is what scholarly writing is meant to cultivate: not just competence with the literature, but genuine critical engagement with it. These writings represent real intellectual work — moments where I had to sit with complexity and resist easy conclusions — and that is what I hope comes through to anyone reading this portfolio.