An introduction...

This blog will seek to address questions about what it means to be a scholar in an increasingly digital and virtual world. Who is teaching to who? How does teaching change as a result of the ultra-accessibility of information? What skills will be crucial to our students to navigate tomorrow's digital world? Are brick-and-mortar universities, p-books, and classrooms all about to become outdated? What is the potential of new technologies to push back the frontiers of knowledge, research and pedagogy?

I am not a techy or interested in gadgets for gadget's sake. In fact, I do not understand how most technologies work, and am not interested. Rather, I am an ordinary academic consumer of technologies, someone who is keen to remain up to date if only to keep up with my students. This site will therefore not replicate the content of "academic productivity" sites which is sometimes quite technical in focus. Instead, it will seek to ask the questions that tend to remain in the background about whether technologies work, and how well they take into account our particular needs as scholars.

I happen to be a legal academic, but I will not particularly concentrate on legal academia, as much as try to think about issues of concerns to the profession in general (at least those in the social sciences).

For a sobering but instructive take on what is arguably happening in our classrooms check: