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• School of Education professor Bonk again listed as influential contributor to education discourse

School of Education professor Bonk again listed as influential contributor to education discourse

• Jan. 10, 2014

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

An Indiana University faculty member is ranked for the third time on a list published on the Education Week website of the top contributors to the public debate about education.

The third annual Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings includes IU School of Education professor Curt Bonk, ranked No. 85 on a list of 200. The rankings are the creation of education researcher and author Rick Hess, who describes them as a way "to recognize those university-based academics who are contributing most substantially to public debates about schools and schooling."

The scores came from measuring the output of articles, books and academic scholarship, along with activity on the Web and in print media. Hess and research assistants compiled a total score from Google Scholar citations, the number of books authored and co-authored, and the ranking of books on Amazon.com, as well as mentions in Education Week and the Chronicle of Higher Education, blogs, U.S. newspapers and the Congressional Record during 2013.

Bonk is a professor of instructional systems technology, educational psychology and cognitive science at the IU School of Education and adjunct instructor for the School of Informatics. He has authored hundreds of papers and estimates that he has delivered well more than 1,300 presentations across the world on the changing nature of education and technology.

In March, Bonk spoke twice during the SXSWedu conference in Austin, Texas. SXSWedu is the education portion of the famed South by Southwest festivals and conferences that focus on music, film and technology and attract about 14,000 annually. In September, Bonk gave a dozen talks across Japan about open education, e-learning pedagogy and massive open online courses, or MOOCs; and in November, he did the same across Taiwan. In between, he helped run a preconference symposium on MOOCs and Open Education at the International E-Learn conference in Las Vegas on Oct. 21, from which he will be editing a book for Routledge.

A few years ago, Bonk authored a comprehensive book on how Web technology is changing access to education worldwide, "The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education," published by Jossey-Bass/Wiley. He is currently completing a book on online motivation and retention using a motivational framework, “TEC-VARIETY,” which he hopes will help instructors around the world better engage as well as retain online and face-to-face learners. The book will soon be available for free as a PDF document, both in total and by chapter.

"Given that the researchers of this study pointed out that there are more than 20,000 university faculty members and researchers tracking difficult educational questions in this country, I am quite delighted to be considered among those making an impact in education with my scholarship,” Bonk said. “No doubt, everyone in education is pushing the field ahead in different ways. I have been lucky enough to find a niche area in the psychology of open education, e-learning and emerging learning technologies that right now is much in the news. There isn’t an hour in the day when something does not come up on my radar to read, react to, write about or share with others. These are extremely fun yet simultaneously challenging times for those in all sectors of education.”