The lecture is often posited as the prototypical "face-to-face" educational encounter, seen as embodying key features of the pre-networked academy. These are implicitly characterised as forms of boundedness or impermeability, in terms of both the physical and temporal context, and the ontological status of the participants and the nature of the…

Today's high-end cell phones have the computing power of a mid-1990s personal computer (PC)--while consuming only one one-hundredth of the energy. Even the simplest, voice-only phones have more complex and powerful chips than the 1969 on-board computer that landed a spaceship on the moon. In the United States, it is almost universally acknowledged…