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stables, the people who curried horses, and so on. The whole subnetwork oftechnologies that depended upon the horse suddenly collapses in what the economistJoseph Schumpeter once called a 'gale of destruction'. But along with the car comepaved roads, gas stations, fast-food restaurants, motels, traffic courts and trafficcops, and traffic lights. A whole new network of goods and services begins to grow,each one filling a niche opened up by the goods and services that came before it."(Waldrop, 1993 p. 119)This one quotation exemplifies clearly that human creativity is often caused when a genuineneed (N 1 ) is identified. Waldrop ascribes this thinking to Brian Arthur, one of the foundingmembers of the Santa Fe Institute who describes this phenomenon as 'lock in', "...once a newtechnology starts opening up new niches for other goods and services, the people who fill thoseniches have every incentive to help that technology grow and prosper." (Waldrop, 1993 p.119)The history of my engagement with educational technology reflects this phenomenon (seeappendices 1-6). Reflecting on the narrative of my career indicates the extent to which I havebecome 'locked in' to new (N 4 ) technological ways of facilitating learning and have demandedever increasing functionality and facility of technologies so that increasing returns might bedriven from each learning episode 24 .A similarly chronological review of texts that deal with technology-enabled learning amplifiesthe above point. In this category, the following are examples of influential and relevant material.Referred to in Waldrop (1993, p. 115) for his contribution to complexity theory but in any case astand-alone contributor to the emerging body of literature is Seymour Papert whose Mindstorms:Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas (1993) has seminal significance in the context of thisthesis. For example, he writes,24 Just today (7 th July 2011), I have shared a ‘google doc’ for the first time with my supervisory team, partly as ameans of enabling access to those working in disparate locations (Nottingham, Wolverhampton and Prague) but alsobecause I can. It is the application of a new skill acquired working alongside employees of a start up technologycompany Anspear Ltd., in a different domain (N 4 ).91Simon Hughes Ph.D. Thesis (October 2012)