For about a decade, I have been responsible at my institution for introducing student teachers to ways of teaching English using information and communications technology (ICT). As in many educational institutions in the UK, the ICT teaching space is a dedicated room, devoid of anything ‘non-ICT’ where all computers are bolted to fixed narrow desks. It is a well-invigilated, specialist area, almost sterile in comparison with other classrooms, and the reading material in the room comprises solely instructions for accessing particular programs and sites. Even now, so many years into the ‘technical revolution’, a strange ‘othering’ of technology persists. Yet this situation in educational institutions seems almost anticipated by the student teachers – bizarrely irrespective of their comfortable and embedded use of technologies elsewhere in their lives. (One might guess that their own experiences as students have shaped their expectations). That is, this ‘othering’ is upheld within the academy even by those who embrace it fully in their everyday lives elsewhere. This situation tends to be replicated in schools, so that when student

teachers undertake their school practice, they need to book dedicated ICT rooms for their teaching and need to plan work so that specific tasks are set for working in this specific environment. In ICT rooms there is rarely room to even use paper and pen, for example, or to use a ‘blended’ approach, where one could choose to use technology or not as appropriate. The uneasiness with which the hardware of ICT lies within academic space not only has implications for literacy practices that take place there, but also signifies a dislocation of ideologies between traditional academic literacy

and new literacy practices. This means that, as Gee argues:

Children are having more and more learning experiences outside of school that are more important for their futures than is much of the learning they do in school.