Introduction: As we may learn …

This special edition of the journal concerns web-based teaching and learning initiatives. By any measure of adoption, the worldwide web has been astonishingly successful. More users are using it faster than any other technology in human history. Within the domain of law, the amount of resources present on the web is bewilderingly huge. It is being used to an ever-greater extent in teaching and learning within campus-based universities and internetbased universities are now seen as possible lucrative extensions of the knowledge industry within higher education. Cardean, Unext, University of Phoenix Online, Scottish Knowledge, HEFCE’s recent statements on the eUniversity and many other collaborations are evidence that universities are taking seriously the Ž nancial potential of both web-based and resource-based learning. This is evident, too, in the reports that investigate the distance-learning potential of the web beyond universities. Documents such as Morgan Keegan’s E-learning: The Engine of the Knowledge Economy, or Merrill Lynch’s The Knowledge Web or the Bank of America’s The e-Bang Theory show that corporations are very interested indeed in the use to which the web can be put for education and training. These and many other reports describe how we are at a hinge in the adoption of the new technologies. In such situations, it is important to stop and look around at what is being achieved, how it was brought about and what it signiŽ es for the future. The felt need to re ect on changes in the technology of reading and writing is not limited to our own times, of course; and it is useful in this regard to take a broad cultural view of the changes within the technologies of communication and learning. In his study of orality and literacy in early German texts Dennis Green points out that in 1471 Guillaume Fichet, re ecting on the technologies of reading and writing, divided them into three periods: that of the calamus or reed pen (classical antiquity), that of the penna or quill pen (medieval literacy) and that of the aereae litterae, the recently-developed ‘movable type’. He observes that Fichet’s divisions parallel the divisions of Walter J. Ong’s argument, developed more than half a millennia later, regarding the nature of communications shifts and points out that both Fichet and Ong develop their arguments precisely because they write close to nodal points in the communications shift. We are writing, still, within such a shift. The changeover period in the 15th century from manuscript to print, in which print established itself as a major communications channel, extended across two generations. If we date the rise of electronic communications via hypertext not from Vannevar Bush’s prophetic article, ‘As We May Think’, but from the rise of the internet, the growth of the PC and the development of hypertext applications in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we can