ABSTRACT
Within higher education (HE), as elsewhere, information and communications technology (ICT) has become ubiquitous. For many of us (and perhaps most of the readers of this chapter), it has become the automatic first action on arriving at our desks to turn on the PC to check for e-mail messages and to ready ourselves for the tasks of the day. For academics at the start of the 21st century, PC-based ICT provides the platform through which we undertake many of our basic work tasks. This circumstance is quite different from that applying even just a decade ago, and completely different from that of a generation ago. The educational environment in which we operate (in our several roles as developers, researchers, teachers and academic administrators) and in which students study has never evolved with greater speed than it is doing at present. And change continues to accelerate.
