This article focuses on the many obstacles that lecturers encounter when learning to use educational technologies in their work, including the inhibitory nature of the larger activity system of the institution and its effect on expansive learning. Data illuminate the theoretical arguments around "learning by expanding"--a notion introduced by Yrjo Engestrom as part of his contribution to activity theory. Unlike Engestrom, who uses the notion of expansive learning as a developmental, interventionist tool in workplace learning (to change practice), I use it as an analytical, explanatory tool in order to explore the notion of expansive cycles in individual and intersecting activity systems and how they can be used to explain university lecturers' varying engagement with educational technologies in their teaching. (Contains 3 figures.)