This article examines key issues in how new technologies are impacting upon how we teach, learn and collaborate, and uses an educational research project called GRAIL (Graduate Researcher's Academic Identity Online) under development to illustrate some fundamental issues in adopting new technologies. A significant challenge to the effective use of new technologies in education is the evolution of social practices around those technologies and the discrepancies between broader social uses of new technologies and how those same technologies can be used in educational contexts. The article describes challenges to design along the dimensions of public/private and individual/collaborative and uses data from a series of project research studies to illustrate the nature of these challenges and possible solutions. The taking up of new technologies in new ways requires the evolution of social practices of use--these practices simultaneously reflect and change our culture, and the evolution of such processes takes time. (Contains 1 table, 3 figures and 4 notes.)