For this particular issue of Synergy Tai Peseta and Kim McShane have selected two topical titles for brief review. Whatever your position on new technologies in teaching and learning, here are two authors you cannot ignore.

ICT and Higher Education
Digital Hemlock: Internet Education and the Poisoning of Teaching
Brabazon, T (2002) Sydney, Australia: University of New South Wales Press

Those of us who inhabit that contested terrain of "enhancing university teaching and learning" would do well to take notice of the way Tara Brabazon frames her discussion of the move to embrace technological pedagogies in response to the challenges facing higher education. Going online it seems, offers students choice, access and flexibility in ways that bodily and fleshy communications cannot, and universities are presently occupied with the right sort of articulation between pedagogy and technology. Brabazon's book draws our attention to both the dangers and possibilities of the technological teaching and learning machine. With such provocative chapter titles: Do you want fries with that? Internet teaching and the administration of knowledge and Point, click and graduate: student motivation in the information age, Brabazon is clearly not against technology. Her book cautions against the eagerness of any relationship between the Internet and Education. As teachers grapple with absence, presence and availability, and students work hard to feel connected when moving through information, knowledge and wisdom, an entirely new set of teaching and learning expectations will develop. These are bigger issues than those pushing technology might admit because it reminds us of the kind of university education we must value in a time of uncertainty and supercomplexity - TP.

Rethinking University Teaching: a conversational framework for the effective use of learning technologies (2nd Edition).
Laurillard, D. (2002) London, UK: RoutledgeFalmer

Almost a decade on, Diana Laurillard revisits the 'conversational framework' that she first revealed to the Higher Education field in 1993. ICT environments have evolved and new ICT-based practices have emerged in the intervening period, and this second edition acknowledges these developments. The revised 'conversational framework' (p. 87) also incorporates signs of the theoretical shifts that have been taking place in educational thinking in the interim. Teaching is still about 'mediating learning' and Laurillard continues to describe the conversations of learning as dialogic relationships that are labelled discursive, adaptive, interactive or reflective. However, in this second edition the spectrum of ICT media have been recategorised into new 'media forms': narrative, interactive, communicative, adaptive, productive. By cross-matching the How (processes) and the What (the media) and by shifting the arrows in her framework, Laurillard seeks to help us understand the educational strengths of each medium. The goal is to plan and provide an 'optimal balance' of media x processes for students. An optimal balance will necessitate some integration of all five media forms, Laurillard writes. It's a 'tall ask', but then the model reveals its educational strength when Laurillard (p 176), observes, 'With [a comparative] analysis of this kind it becomes possible to see the extent to which the idea of a wholly electronic university is an extremely sub-optimal solution.' Essential reading for flexible educators. - KMcS