Introduction

Abstract

I first came across the internet when I saw the famous web-cam set up by researchers in the Cambridge University computing department, which they used to keep an eye on the coffee percolator upstairs while they were working in another room. This was somewhere between 1990 and 1993 (my memory is hazy). I wasn’t particularly impressed but my friend Rhodri thought it was cool. He was our house’s technological enthusiast and we were all natural scientists, so it was no surprise that we were aware of what was going on in the ‘spod shop’ (the derogatory name applied to the computing building). But apart from that and some lectures on computing I missed in the first year, the internet had no real impact on my teaching and learning. I was still writing my essays by hand, reading library books and journal articles in hard-bound volumes that smelled of old paper and glue. I left Cambridge without ever seeing anything online or sending any email, though I knew people who were doing both of those things in their leisure time.