The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss some communicative opportunities
currently emerging in networked classrooms and their implications for didactics. In
particular, I examine multiple contexts that appear and how they give rise to
diverse practices. However, such practices often have their origin in out-of-school
contexts and not in institutional discourse and curricula. Consequently, we need to
understand how these practices can be explored and exploited in educational
contexts. Otherwise, schools risk losing out on important cultural change and may
fail to prepare learners for emergent communicative opportunities and requirements.
In this paper, which is based on a longitudinal study of Norwegian teachers of
English practising in technology-rich environments, I discuss the implications of
teaching in and across multiple contexts that emerge in technology-rich
environments. Findings indicate that we need to develop our notion of didactics so
that it supports teachers working across multiple contexts. As such, didactics takes
on the characteristics of a boundary object that mediates learning in and across
different social worlds.
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