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and revising their ideas and misconceptions. Such activity involves collaboration,with occasional competition, among students. Collaborative environments canencourage the knowledge construction model for lasting learning.' (Sprague andDede 1999 p.8)Sprague and Dede (1999 ibid) acknowledge the contribution of Jonassen's (1996) importantwork in this area and his influence on the development of their pedagogic approach. Writingfrom a different perspective Wenger, White and Smith (2009) write, 'The close, voluntarycollaboration in communities enables their members to invent and share new uses for thetechnologies at their disposal. Communities often play a key role in the dissemination andappropriation of new technologies.' (Wenger, White and Smith, 2009 p. 12) In all cases whatseems to be the case is that computers provide collaboration and communication tools whichlend themselves well to knowledge-construction. Somekh (see e.g. 2007 30 ) is pre-eminent indescribing these phenomena as 'affordances'.A brief examination of the 'Facebook Effect' (see Kirkpatrick, 2010) illustrates this point well asusers of this global technological aid to interactivity affords its users communication,collaboration and the construction of knowledge. My first encounter with a 'facebook' was onthe second cohort of Teach First in 2004. In that iteration, digital photos were taken of all staffand participants and turned into an electronic document with brief résumés 31 of each personadded, so that we all would know who each other was. It was little surprise to me that withintwo years of this phenomenon, I became aware of an online solution emanating from Palo Alto,California that was becoming widely available across campuses. This is itself a microcosm ofthe fourth ' N 4 ' of the emerging framework, an existing idea applied in a new technologisedsetting.30 Somekh (2007) is a compendium of the most recent expression of her thoughts, re-publishing aspects of her workfrom the late 1990s.31 The use of the US English term has been adopted to account for the North American origins of this programme.98Simon Hughes Ph.D. Thesis (October 2012)