ABSTRACT
The Schome community, led by Peter Twining of the Open University, was already active as an essentially voluntary organisation under university auspices, comprising a wide range of people interested in what might loosely be termed alternative models of education. Within the Schome community technology was seen not only as a tool to support and extend existing practices but also as having the potential to transform ways of representing the world and supporting learning. It is beyond his scope to systematically investigate learning across the project. Regarding literacy in terms of skills and levels, to be tested in inauthentic exercises, undervalues the vernacular literacies and ways of learning of peoples everyday lives. Peoples multiple literacy practices are shaped by a constellation of factors, including their previous experiences and access to social and cultural resources. Virtual ethnography or cyberethnographies are clearly a comparable development, through which researchers use interpretive methods to explore the dynamic culture of online communities or virtual worlds.
