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wisdom from the words and works of others, plugging in, however peripherally, to existing oremerging human or technological networks. Since the process of learning with technology is aninevitably ceaseless process as each new iteration of it requires new learning, so the learner hasto apply constantly newly-acquired knowledge, skills and understanding in a whole range of newcontexts or learning opportunities. All of this will be entirely related to a self-selected careerpathway. Learning in the ZAP is personal, autonomous and technologised but it is also utterlydependent on the pedagogical agency of other humans and, in the 21 st Century, personalcomputers.“Computers, long a symbol of depersonalization, were recast as tools for ‘conviviality’ and‘dream machines’. Computers, long a symbol of the power of the ‘big’ – big corporations,big institutions, big money – began to acquire an image as instruments fordecentralization, community and personal autonomy.” (Turkle, 1990 p.268)I cannot find any reference to Turkle’s ideas in the Jobs’ biography (Isaacson, 2011) but thecontribution of her one-time husband, Seymour Papert, is alluded to in Waldrop’s history ofcomplexity theory (Waldrop, 1992). As senior academics at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology (MIT) during the explosion of the information era, their ideas were prevalent and Iwonder if it is in this quotation that we have the theoretical origins of the iPod.As I indicated in IM5 and alluded to in the introduction, the existence of this hypothesis wouldhave been impossible without the impetus to personalisation and autonomy wrought by thatdevice. The etymological connections between autonomy and auto/pedagogy are clear when thewords themselves are arrayed in the same sentence. The invention of the iPod has catalysed forme a change in my thinking about how teachers’ professional learning could be facilitated andenabled. What I believe, as was the case for me back in 1989, is that this will be true whenteachers recognise the autonomy they have to actively participate in learning programmes that296Simon Hughes Ph.D. Thesis (October 2012)