Such is the pace of technological innovation in the early years of the millennium that many young people, according to a recent survey, no longer like e-mail, preferring more ‘modern’ forms of communication such as instant messaging, Skype or SMS. Will e-mail, one wonders, soon be joining the list of other ‘dead media’ that have fallen into disuse, forgotten and defunct, described on the site of ‘The Dead Media Project’ (www.deadmedia.org)? Any of us with children or family younger than ourselves can see how realistic this scenario could be. Reading through the articles making up the present edition of EPS, one is struck by the thought that one of the common threads running through most if not all of them is the impact of technology and innovation on what we do as political scientists, and the need to stay abreast and exploit these changes if we, as a profession, are to survive and thrive.

This is most obvious in the case of our symposium where Sarah Hale presents five articles describing a range of innovative responses to the challenges of teaching at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As Hale points out, recent years have seen a range of public policy