Cyberdam and SIMPLE: a study in divergent developments and convergent aims

Abstract

It is a design truism that form affects function, and in education it is also generally accepted that functionality affects learning. In truth, all technology both constrains and liberates. In the thirteenth century, for example, the massive information overload represented by texts such as Justinian’s Digest and the proliferation of Church law required scholars and users to create the symbolic tools that would help them to cope with problems of understanding and memorizing the legal information overload (Maharg,2007). Those tools both enabled legal scholarship to flourish, but also constrained that scholarship by limiting the conditions under which it was produced, for whom, and how.It could be argued that the introduction of moveable type in the fifteenth-century had the same effect (Rhodes & Sawday, 2000).