The Technoliteracy Challenge: Teaching globalisation using the Internet

Under fiscal pressure and grappling with technological transformations, more and more universities are attempting to re-invent themselves as technologically facilitated educational institutions, fast and flexible enough for networking times. The adoption of new instructional technologies poses challenges to universities and education as we know it. This paper considers the educational challenges and opportunities offered by sociotechnical networks such as the Internet. Using the case of a second-year undergraduate course on globalisation, it outlines some practical educational possibilities for using the Internet that might facilitate, instead of compromise, critical thinking. It suggests that geography educators need to begin developing a critical technoliteracy that will respond to our informationally mediated world, a literacy not merely of technical competence but one which contextualises the Internet within a political economy of globalisation and continuously deconstructs, destablises and displaces its presentation as a spectacle and cyber-utopia.