ABSTRACT
Things change quite quickly in the field of education and new technology. A previous volume on history and ICT (Haydn and Counsell, 2003) was written when Wikipedia had only recently been launched, and had under 200,000 entries. MySpace and Skype were not yet online, Facebook and YouTube had yet to be launched, Twitter, iTunes and the iPhone did not exist. The term ‘Web 2.0’ had only recently been coined, and was in its infancy. Few history classrooms were equipped with a data projector, had internet access, interactive whiteboards or access to a VLE (Haydn, 2004). Data were often stored on what was called a ‘floppy disk’; something I now use as an artefact to help illustrate the increase in the pace of change occasioned by improvements in communications technology (see Google ngram for an illustration of the life-cycle of the floppy disk compared to the blackboard – https://www.google.com/ngrams" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">www.google.com/ngrams).
