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"In my vision the computer acts as a transitional object to mediate relationships thatare ultimately between person and person. There are mathophobes with a fine senseof moving their bodies, and there are mathophiles who have forgotten the sensorymotor roots of their mathematical knowledge. The Turtle establishes a bridge. Itserves as a common medium in which can be recast the shared elements of bodygeometry and formal geometry. Recasting juggling as structured programming canbuild a bridge between those who have a fine mathetic sense of physical skills andthose who know how to go about organizing the task of writing an essay on history."(Papert, 1993 p.184)Similarly influential have been Salmon's (2000) E-Moderating: The Key to Teaching andLearning Online and E-tivites: The Key to Active Learning Online (Salmon, 2002), as well asKearsley's (2000) Online Education: Learning and Teaching in Cyberspace, Thorne's (2004)Blended Learning: How to Integrate Online and Traditional Learning, Lynch's (2002) TheOnline Educator and Wenger, White and Smith's (2009) Digital Habitats: StewardingTechnology for Communities. What can be seen, even in the titles of the text themselves, is theevolution of the discourse which continues to move from talking about computers (see Papert,1993) to communities (see Wenger, White and Smith, 2009). Thus, it is fair to say, that inparallel to the development of my career - as narrated via appendices 1-6 - there has been acommensurate development in thinking about the influence of technology on learning. We areno longer concerned with what computers can do, we are concerned with what they, moregenerically categorised as 'technology', can do for us as communities of professionals – putsimply networks (N 3 ),"Technology extends and reframes how communities organize and expressboundaries and relationships, which changes the dynamics of participation,peripherality and legitimacy. It enables very large groups to share information andideas at the same time as it helps smaller groups with narrower, more specialized anddifferentiated domains to form and function effectively. It allows communities toemerge in public, opening their boundaries limitlessly, but it also makes it easy to setup private spaces that are open only to members. It affords many ways to limitaccess, expressing intimacy or privilege, or it can greatly enlarge a group's periphery.A person who comes across a community site as a result of a search engine, combs itfor ideas and information, and never comes back is part of the largest periphery."(Wenger, White and Smith, 2009 p.11)92Simon Hughes Ph.D. Thesis (October 2012)