Literacy and the politics of representation

in a never-ending race of putting the cart before the horse. This book is for students and researchers trying to make sense of the new opportunities afforded by technology. It is firmly anchored in authoritative scholarship highlighting new ideas and possibilities. At the outset I said this is a difficult balance to strike between capturing the ‘zeitgeist of digital scholarship’ as one of the books’ former reviewers puts it (George Siemens, Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute, Athabasca University) and the pace of technological change. It is future-proofed, to a degree, because of its emphasis on scholarship, but it will fail to attract some readers because of this. My bigger concern is that the book must be updated with new additions in order not to look very dated because of the few technologies it does reference explicitly and that it does not capture, for me, how profound the changes of the last five years have been in the digital landscape. Martin Weller does sound the obvious warning not to be over-eager to adopt every new advance as an improvement (‘Next-Big-Thingism’). For example, he quite correctly highlights the negative effects of lecturers developing social network tools and invading what many students see as their personal space. We are living in a world where new devices can spark revolutions in educational practice. The Digital Scholar of the late 1990s could read and understand the concepts this book discusses. In many cases they would be aspirational rather than directly realisable/achievable as they are now, but the fundamental ideas would be meaningful. I do not think this will be the case for much longer. Profound changes as a result of technological change, the demands of industry and commerce, student financing and social attitudes to higher education mean we have to work ‘smarter’. This book will help scholars to understand what working ‘smarter’ means.