This paper begins with three very "public" examples of how education providers across Australia are attempting to assimilate new teaching and learning technologies into existing teaching and learning structures. The transition, as predicted, is not altogether smooth. The dual concepts of the online classrooms as a "self-actualising theme park" and/or "a trial by multimedia" are used as contrastive metaphors to frame discussion of where and how the discourses of education and technology converge in the classroom. The paper presents a layered case study that brings together the "practical discourse" of the teacher, the new discourses of teaching and learning confronting our students, and the challenge these provide to the "management" discourse of school administrators. Is the online classroom a self-actualising theme park, or is it a trial by multimedia? Using a convenience sample of year 8 SOSE (Studies of Society and Environment) students, the paper applies quantitative as well as qualitative methods to explore and document the educational, social and technological outcomes of students (and their teacher) in their first experience of online learning. The emerging "community of practice" is the crucial node at which technology-in and technology-and education is aligned, and its members organised and merged. This situated account describes how this "merging" is taking place within one classroom, and how allegiance to the practice of learning both re-engineers and re-orients the very roles, relationships and distributed knowledge of the school community. In particular, the paper offers a gendered account of how students mediate online learning, how new learning technologies are appropriated for classroom delivery, and how online teaching challenged one teacher's classroom practice. (Contains 1 table and 5 figures.)