1 New technology and habits of mind

“When I was a child, I was sometimes allowed, as a special treat, to look at my grandmother's stereopticon slides. You looked at two pictures side by side through a pair of glasses and they blended into one three-dimensional image of a peculiar world, often long-skirted women wearing floral hats and holding bicycles. Today, I realize that riding a bicycle was the mark of a confident and modern woman liberated from the strictures of Victorian society. And now, through the lens of my grandmother's mind, I think I can see a picture of that distant pre-scientific world.” (Flynn, 2009, p87) The centrality of technology in human life has manifested itself throughout history in all cultures and civilisations. This paper examines the role of new technology in restructuring processes of thinking and knowing, and its impact on social practices of knowledge building. It highlights the transformative force of new technology, necessitating changes in our „habits of mind ‟ to manage the increasing complexity of the contemporary information landscape. Also, it shows that convergent new technology remediates processes of shared knowledge building, creating virtual, collaborative, continuously evolving arenas of activity. Thus, new media contexts afford new forms of social collectivity in virtual space, requiring a fresh understanding of collective action and creation, the ability to belong to different social groups that may not meet face-to-face, the skills to artfully reconnect thought and practice in a simulated world, and the confidence to establish new relations to authority