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Understanding communication technologies through the networks by which people connect, communicate and cooperate has been a constant feature in the work of researchers who have not dissociated their view about the meaning of technologies within new social movements. This paper states that Information and Communication Technologies are not only networks that people join individually, but that they also act as social technologies. Their improvement depends both on the diversity of their functions (social, political, cognitive, etc.) and on the flexibility they have to adapt to functional diversity (to lifecycles, changing and fluctuating mobility or to audiovisual perception thresholds, for example). This idea is supported by the new technological challenge represented by portable devices, the personal area network, high-use user interfaces, systems designed for home care, etc. All this will be tried and tested in this paper within the educational context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the uses of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the universities of Castilla and León. We believe that the integration of ICT in the universities is essential for the development of a university system in line with the requirements of the knowledge society. This piece of work must be placed within a research that has analyzed the use of ICT in higher education in the universities of Castilla and León. In our view, the uses of ICT in higher education are one of the main key indicators for its level of integration. With this research, whose goals relate to ascertaining the level of integration of ICT in the universities of Castilla and León, we seek to identify the factors that influence the use-avoidance of ICT by professors, and to describe the uses that they make of ICT in the development of their profession (teaching and research). For this reason, we have conducted an ex-post-facto research with a descriptive and improvement-seeking motivation. Even though the results of this research highlight the widespread use of ICT within universities, they also point out that this use is superficial and indicate a lack of actual integration of ICT in the universities of Castilla and León. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]