ABSTRACT
Higher education (HE) has played a pivotal role in the development of networked computing and the accumulation of global information resources (Brown and Duguid, 1998) and the UK HE sector has been among the world leaders in this field (NCIHE, 1997; JISC, 2001). Individually, many UK institutions have responded to the strategic imperative of the Dearing Report, ‘to harness both the communications infrastructure and the growing and developing collections of high quality learning materials’ (NCIHE, 1997) in support of their own students’ learning needs. Responses have included the creation of new management roles, investment in information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure, and strategic funding (Gibbs, 2000). Nevertheless, the current JISC five-year plan (JISC, 2001) reports that the provision of technology infrastructure and resources has outstripped the capacity of the academic community to exploit it. This concern is echoed in the latest Campus Computing Survey from the United States (Green, 2000), which found that:
Two decades after the first desktop computers arrived on college campuses, we have come to recognize that the campus community’s major technology challenges involve human factors-assisting students and faculty to make effective use of new technologies in ways that support teaching, learning, instruction and scholarship.
