The view that information and communication technologies (ICT) are a useful tool for raising educational standards dates back to the 1950s and the findings of Harvard psychologist BF Skinner.¹ More recently, support for the effectiveness of ICT as a teaching and learning device has come from the educational and psychological literature (recently reviewed by Heathe

In the last two decades, rapid improvements in Information and Communications Technology – ICT – has wrought enormous change on the world. As with other so-called general purpose technologies, its productivity impact was initially not much felt. As Solow quipped in 1987, computers were everywhere “except in the productivity statistics”.