ABSTRACT
Education and learning are messy businesses, drawing on many different influences and party to many shaping factors. Educational information and communication technology (ICT) has been seized upon by governments and politicians as a short-term ‘fix’ for a variety of educational problems and issues. Extensive initiatives such as the National Grid for Learning have been developed which place ICT at the heart of educational policymaking. The most obvious area of contention could be that of the technology itself. Indeed, many people would point towards technological issues as a primary cause of discrepancy between the rhetoric and reality of education in the ‘information age’. To point solely towards the short-comings of technology is, of course, to overlook many other real issues faced by ICT-based education. If ICT can be seen to clash with the social processes of education then it can also be seen to clash with the many educational cultures and sub-cultures that it comes into contact with.
