Introduction

Writing on the educational and social potential of new technologies is interspersed with imagined cyber-utopias and cyber-dystopias. Commentators have been preoccupied with, on the one hand, the emancipatory potential of technology to empower individuals and groups and, on the other, the potential of technology for surveillance, oppression and constraint. Similarly, in relation to cognitive development, new forms of technology are frequently presented as either enabling (providing additional tools and contexts in which learners can develop new skills and understandings) or limiting (engaging users in routine tasks and procedures that dull creativity and impede problem solving activity). In the meantime, practitioners and researchers across the world, in a variety of institutional settings and social, cultural and economic conditions, are using new technologies in anticipated and unanticipated ways, with both anticipated and unanticipated consequences.