Since 2012, Danah Henriksen and I, along with the Deep-Play Research Group, have been writing a regular column for TechTrends. The most recent one, on agentic AI, came out in August, and it was number 77th, with the next one coming in a few weeks. Somewhere along the way we started to wonder what the whole thing added up to. We had a rough sense of which pieces people cited (Google scholar is useful for something like that), but we never had an easy way to look across the full record at once… counting citations for 77 short pieces and setting them against everything else the journal has published is the kind of job that never makes it to the top of anyone’s list. Now we have a tool that can do it, so we asked Claude to help us gather the numbers.
First, though, a word of thanks. A column like this exists only because editors are willing to give it room, issue after issue, for years on end, and we have been lucky in ours. Abbie Brown took a chance on us, followed by Dan Surry, Chuck Hodges, John Curry and Lucas Vasconcelos, each of whom has supported the series during their time with the journal, and we are grateful to every one of them.
The column began as “Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century.” The very first piece, “Crayons are the Future” (2012), argued that creativity belongs at the center of how we think about educational technology, a central claim of the series. That however, has not prevented us from expanding our interests as the years went by. The early columns were essays on what creativity is and how we might recognize it, including the NEW framework (novel, effective, whole) that Danah and I have returned to many times. From 2014 we wrote a run of columns on what we called the 7 trans-disciplinary habits of mind: perceiving, patterning, abstracting, embodied thinking, modeling, play and synthesis. Starting in 2016 the column became mostly a series of conversations with some of the top researchers in creativity, people whose work we admired, among them Keith Sawyer, Mark Runco, James Kaufman, Ronald Beghetto (twice), Jonathan Plucker, Vlad Glaveanu, Yong Zhao, Barbara Kerr, Rex Jung, Arne Dietrich, Richard Buchanan and Paul Pangaro. A literal who’s-who of creativity research. In 2022 Danah led the way on a set on mindfulness and creativity, something she had become increasingly interested in. We celebrated a decade of the series with a couple of reflections written by the whole group (one at a personal level & the second at the level of ideas). Since early 2023 the column has focused (not surprisingly) on generative AI. The title has shifted along the way too: it ran as “Reimagining Technology, Creativity & Learning” in 2021 and has been “Rethinking Creativity and Technology in Education” since 2022.
A bunch of thematically-connected early columns became two books, both published by Springer in 2018: Creativity, Technology & Education: Exploring their Convergence, which gathered and revised the early pieces on what creativity is and where it lives. And The 7 Transdisciplinary Cognitive Skills for Creative Education grew out of the habits-of-mind columns.
In terms of impact, the 77 columns have about 1,900 citations in Google Scholar, and 755 works by authors in 80 countries cite at least one of them. Eight columns have more than 90 citations each. The most cited is “A NEW approach to defining and measuring creativity” (2013, 155 citations), followed closely by “Generative AI, Teacher Knowledge and Educational Research” (2024, 147), which is also the second most-cited article TechTrends published that year. The citations come from across a wide range of disciplines (psychology, computer science, the arts and humanities, neuroscience and medicine, as well as from education) not surprising given the topics we were writing about—which often crossed disciplinary boundaries.
The number of new works citing the series each year shows relatively steady growth: from 3 in 2012 to 122 in 2025, with 81 more by mid-September 2026.
We also wanted to see how the columns compared with the rest of the journal. The columns are short, usually about six pages (4-5000 words) while journal articles are close to double that. TechTrends does publish other short pieces, so the obvious comparison is with those shorter pieces. These shorter pieces (not including our series) have a median of one citation. Our columns do much better than that (7 citations). In fact, a typical column in our series is cited about as often as the typical full-length TechTrends article from the same year (a median of 7 citations each). That said, the picture changes quite a bit over time as the chart below shows.
The early essays were cited far more than the typical article of their time, and the habits-of-mind columns came out about even. The interviews from 2017 to 2022 fell below the journal’s typical article, while since 2023 the AI columns have pulled well ahead again. (One caution in reading the chart: older pieces have had more time to collect citations, so compare the two bars within each period rather than across periods.)
The dip in the interview years needs some context. Part of the explanation, we suspect, is that creativity research has never been a core area for most TechTrends readers. But citations we would argue are just one way to measure what those conversations did. They brought many of the leading scholars of creativity into the pages of an educational technology journal, and they gave readers a direct view of how these people think about learning and technology. (At a more selfish level, these interviews allowed us to get in touch with some of the best minds working in the creativity space—which has had its own personal dividend.)
One of the things we had suspected was that our columns did something unique—bring new ideas to the TechTrends audience, sometimes before they hit the “mainstream.” And the data demonstrates this quite clearly. Of the 71 TechTrends pieces with “creativity” in the title since 2012, 54 are our columns. So clearly we were instrumental in bringing this important topic to a more ed-tech oriented audience. Further, our piece on “Of Art and Algorithms,” written with Aman Yadav in 2013, connected computational thinking and art two years before the journal published its first article with “computational thinking” in the title. Our first pieces on generative AI, “From crayons to AI” and a conversation with Chris Dede about GPT-3 and other forms of “alien intelligence,” appeared in the spring of 2023, among the first the journal published on the topic. And the most recent columns, on AI sycophancy, on the metaphors we use for AI, and on agentic AI, are so far the only TechTrends pieces on those important topics.
It is also interesting to see what has stayed steady over these years. We began the series in 2012 by arguing (tongue firmly in cheek) that crayons are the future. That essay looked back at how hard it has always been to predict which technologies will matter for education, and argued that creativity belongs at the center of how we think about educational technology. In 2023 we wrote “From crayons to AI,” and this August we asked whose agency is really at stake when schools adopt “agentic” AI. Fourteen years on, we are still asking where human creativity and agency fit, only now the technology in question is AI. More people seem to be asking it with us, too: 42 new works cited the series in 2022, 122 did in 2025, and there are already 81 this year. The next column comes out in a few weeks.
The numbers also confirm something I have believed for a long time, which is that the pieces that last are the ones built around ideas. The most-cited columns are nearly all essays that proposed a way of thinking about something: the NEW criteria for judging creativity, the habits of mind that we argued cut across disciplines, a case for rethinking teacher knowledge in the age of generative AI. Across the series, the typical essay has been cited more than twice as often as the typical interview (a median of 25 citations versus 11 in Google Scholar). I think this says something about what our field needs. We need empirical work, of course, but we also need spaces where we can play with ideas, try out new combinations and see what holds up, and there are not many places in academic publishing that allow for that. A column also lets us take a wider lens than a research article usually can. We have been able to look back at history, as in the columns tracing the history of AI in education and the parallel histories of machine and human learning, and to place new technologies in a longer cultural story, as when we followed cultural technologies from cave walls to ChatGPT. This column has given Danah and me, and the students who wrote with us, a place to do exactly that, in public, for fourteen years. The citations indicate that our writing has been meaningful to others, but we would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that what we have gained from it, personally, is immeasurable.
The complete list of columns, with links to each, is on the series page.
None of this would have happened without the Deep-Play Research Group. Twenty-seven people besides Danah and I have co-authored columns, most of them doctoral students at the time, and their names are below. Over the years the column has become a thread running across generations of our graduate students, and it has kept us connected long after graduation and through all the changes life brings.
Everyone who has contributed to the series (current members of the Deep-Play Research Group in italics): Liz Boltz, William Cain, Michael deSchryver, Kristin DeBruler, Kristin Elwood, Matthew Evans, Chris Fahnoe, Jon Good, Natalie Gruber, Danah Henriksen, Megan Hoelting, Sarah Keenan-Lechel, Matthew Koehler, Lindsey McCaleb, Rohit Mehta, Punya Mishra, Nicole Oster, Carmen Richardson, Sandra Sawaya, Shagun Singha, Colin Terry, Laura Terry, Melissa Warr, Lauren Woo and Aman Yadav.