ABSTRACT
Much has been written about the ways that electronic, digital technology can ‘transform’ or ‘revolutionize’ interpersonal communications. This is not mere hyperbole. People can now communicate quite easily with other individuals far away, send each other various kinds of multimodal information and organize group events and collective creations without being ever in the same room as other participants. Both of us, the authors, have written articles with co-authors we have never met and would not recognize on the street. Terms such as ‘transformation’ and ‘revolution’ have also been used to make claims about the effects of that same technology on education. Again, there is some justification for such claims. Distance education is now possible on a level of scale and accessibility its pioneers could hardly have imagined; and the ubiquity of PCs, laptops, tablets and interactive whiteboards (all connected to the internet) in classrooms would probably astonish even a computer scientist of the early 1960s.
