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handheld learning platform developed by Anspear Ltd. which makes English Language andNumeracy learning interactive, discrete, multimodal, portable and cheap. As an example of'liberation technology' (Law, 2001 p. 165), I will return to the Anspear tool in section 2.3.3.Here, though, its development illustrates also how advances in technology are shaping the waywe learn today and as Standish (2000) shows, this is because of the 'confluence of certain socioculturalfactors with elements of the hardware' (Standish, 2000 p. 152).To summarise this section I have chosen to cite verbatim the following quotation written in2000. It could be Standish's description of a museum exhibit:"What is understood by 'computer' here is probably the desktop; typically this willincorporate the box housing the processor and drives, the keyboard and a screen......The fact that we habitually think of the computer in terms of this particular configurationof box, keyboard and screen reflects, quite naturally, the way in which the technology hasdeveloped and the part that it plays in our lives. It is not difficult to imagine a differentmachine without screen or keyboard, one that relied primarily on a combination of numberkeypads, microphones and loudspeakers, and yet that used more or less the samemicrochips. The home computer that we in fact have has developed in the context ofparticular social activities and cultural meanings. It cannot be understood merely in termsof an inevitable technological evolution, a kind of inhuman force that increasinglydetermines our lives." (Standish, 2000 p. 151)Is it possible that Standish had seen a prototype of the iPod? Might he have had a premonitionof the ubiquitous spread of handheld devices? Could he have been predicting the emergence ofvirtual/touch screen keyboards? The reality is that technology is changing people as fast aspeople are changing technology - again the confluence of socio-economic factors and thehardware. In the context of this study, it is important to note that simultaneously the affordancesof potential 'learning technologies' are changing with every release of new hard or software. Insuch circumstances the need (N 1 ) for human beings to learn in agile and flexible ways seems toincrease and thus it is appropriate to consider next the potential impact of technology onpedagogy/andragogy.106Simon Hughes Ph.D. Thesis (October 2012)