ABSTRACT
The basis for the methodological approaches described in this chapter are formed by the arguments put forward for educational researchers to make use of methodologies that appear most likely to be appropriate for answering the research questions of their projects. Whenever this author-researcher was confronted with the task of investigating uses of IT within the constantly shifting complexities of classroom interactions between a teacher and 25 or more learners, it was obvious that there was a multitude of variables that would impact on the research. In classrooms there are far too many variables to be treated using traditional approaches that involve attempting to keep some of them constant, and focus only on a few. The ecology metaphor proposed by Cobb et al. (2003) pragmatically accepts that because they are ongoing and constantly evolving, the interactions and interplay among classroom variables means that the variables cannot be isolated or ignored by researchers.
