ABSTRACT
It’s become obvious to those of us who teach in higher education that the Internet is fulfilling a number of research roles for students, teachers and researchers. It is a huge resource, part library and part encyclopedia, which we all turn to with greater or lesser frequency for information. It is also an easily-accessible field site (as some people, such as Hine (2000) argue, in fact too accessible) for researching new social formations and new versions of existing social formations. It is a vast infrastructure and a material culture that impacts on everyday life in ways both spectacular and mundane (Star 1999). It has transformed the way we write, the way we work, the way we live, even the way we think. And, in universities like mine, it poses new challenges and offers new opportunities – as we dabble with virtual learning
and try to deal with the incredible variety of materials and uses offered.
