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This Research FULL PAPER extends recent scholarship on the role of technology in workplace learning in professional engineering and computing settings. Digitization of work practices has made a noticeable impact on how engineers gain expertise and solve problems they encounter at work. In this paper we use a workplace learning ecology lens to examine engineers' situated information seeking to identify practices associated with the use of online resources. Building on a previous qualitative interview study, we developed and administered a survey consisting of 16 items to assess use of online resources across learning experiences. We found high use of online resources but with variations among the use of specific resources by field, problem, and learning goal. LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, Reddit, and technology vendor websites were the primary online platforms used by respondents for both learning and problem-solving. Respondents placed different levels of trust in online resources. Social media, especially Twitter, was trusted least across all sources. The highest trust was placed on websites of technology vendors. Findings from this work can help create better educational content as well as pedagogical interventions that use online resources for training the future workforce. 

Full Paper: Digital transformations are reshaping engineering practices with implications for conducting engineering education research. Given the paucity of discussion of digital methods within engineering education research, we believe it is important to examine and present to the community an overview of how digital technology is changing research practices. In this paper we focus on digital ethnography as it has implications for studies of technical education and work, which necessarily involve using, and observing how others employ digital data sources, tools, systems, methods, etc. In this paper we report preliminary results from an in-depth literature search and review. To select the papers for the review, we first examined prior meta-review papers that identified new ethnographic methods appropriate for digital contexts (e.g., network ethnography, trace ethnography, rapid ethnography, connective ethnography, focused ethnography, etc.). We then used these as keywords to search for papers that were representative of these methods and selected the 100 most cited papers from this corpus, with further screening resulting in a final collection of 91 papers. We then conducted free/open coding of the articles followed by thematic coding to identify six categories and dived deeper into one of the categories, focused on different approaches to ethnography, to further explore the various types of ethnographic methods mentioned in the collected literature. We close by discussing how emerging techniques in ethnographic field research can be applied to engineering education research with engineering work practices as an exemplar. 

Increasing digitisation of engineering and social practices has altered the relationship between formal schooling and development of expertise for professional engineering work. What does the development of expertise look like when knowledge is generated and shared at an accelerated pace due to shifts in technology? In this paper, I present case studies of two early career software engineers. Using methodological insights from digital ethnography, I trace their professional journeys over two decades. I empirically demonstrate how the development of engineering expertise is a continuous and perpetual endeavour and engineers learn throughout their lives (lifelong) and across all the different spaces they inhabit at any given time (lifewide). I argue for extending engineering work practices research and research in engineering education more broadly to take larger timescales of learning into account to build a comprehensive understanding of engineering expertise development.