ABSTRACT
Changing socio-technical practices necessarily alter the resources we have for learning, and for the last 30 years it has been around the uptake and design of learning technologies that a signifi cant debate about education’s capacity to adapt to ‘the future’ has been conducted. From the 1980s to the present day, harnessing technology to create better learning environments has been a useful political strategy for adapting to socio-technical change, and has served as an important symbol of what is usually called ‘Modernizing Education for the Twenty-fi rst Century’. This approach, however, tends to see the relationship of education to socio-technical change as a technical and specialized issue, concerned with the mechanics and methods of learning rather than affecting the wider goals of education.
