In this paper I review current debates about the nature of scholarship in higher education (following Boyer 1990) and the impact of digital communication practices on its role in research and teaching (e.g. Borgman 2007, Pearce et al 2010), and discuss a methodological framework for researching these issues, drawing on work in Literacies for Learning (Ivani? et al 2007) and Socio-technical Interaction (Kling et al 2003)