Can we use the Internet to help students become world citizens?
The interface between a student and her Net pal is undeniably thin, one-dimensional, remote. As valuable as it may nevertheless be, it is not the missing key for teaching global citizenship. It scarcely counts beside the much more fundamental sources of social understanding. The girl, of course, will learn whatever she does of friendship from peers who sweat, bleed, taunt, curse, tantalize, steal, console, and so on. It I need to find out whether she will become a good world citizen, don’t show me a file of her email correspondence. Just let me observe her behavior on the playground for a few minutes- -assuming she spends her class breaks on the playground, and not at her terminal playing video games. A high-school computer instructor wrote to me that “students who think it is cool to have a pen pal in Malaysia won’t talk to the black students who locker next to them….I have run a telecom project for students in TAG classes for the last two years and I have yet to see any of the TAG
