I spent a couple of days in Barcelona last week, one at the terrific Univeritat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), the virtual university, where I met a group of like minded enthusiasts for the deployment of technology in education, who actually understood what can and cannot be done with technology in that context.

I shouldn't be surprised at this but it is such a rarity in the thick of all the nonsense that gets talked, written about and done in the name of computers in education that it was an absolutely delightful day. UOC have grown from about 300 to 30000 students in about ten years. They have also in that time been learning the same lessons, as an institution, that those of us in the Open University in the UK who have been deeply engaged in deploying multimedia computer and Internet facilitated education with large numbers of students over a similar period have learnt about the potential, current limitations and practicalities of technological tools in an educational context.

I only hope our wonderful hosts, Sylvia Gonzalez and Ferran Gimenez Prado, found it as useful as we did.