The Internet offers tantalising opportunities for development education, a subject which strives to foster students’ sense of belonging to an interdependent, international community. The Internet offers a living example of just such a community, and one that students can experience cheaply and directly.

Development educationists sometimes despair at the lack of international coverage in traditional media. The Internet makes alternative sources of information accessible. Where else could you get high quality coverage of events like the Beijing conference, for example, allowing women from all over the world to publicise their concerns?

Different aspects of the Internet offer different opportunities. Electronic mail is the equivalent of conventional letters, except messages are delivered in minutes, not days. In countries with good electronic networks, such as Nicaragua, it is the first time that fast, reliable international communication has been possible. Young people are busy looking for keypals (electronic penfriends).

Newsgroups are electronic group discussions. There are thousands of these, and their quality varies enormously. The best are lively communities. If you want to test your assumptions, try joining a newsgroup of people who don’t share your background or opinions.

The Web is more of a broadcast medium. Individuals and organisations, including schools, use its pages to explain their work or display information. What is special about the Web is that one page can be linked electronically to another. This makes it easy to follow different routes through the information, without worrying about which machines you are connecting to. As it gets easier for ordinary users to write their own pages, people will be able to customise the Web more. Currently, the best site on the Web for development education is One World Online.

So why aren’t development educationists and teachers rushing to use the Internet?

The Oxford Development Education Centre is running a project called Development On-line to investigate the development education potential of the Internet. Work with groups of Year 11 general studies students at Cherwell School has highlighted some of the bonuses as well as the problems. At first students used the Internet as a reference library. Groups chose topics ranging from teenagers’ wage levels to support for single parents and researched these using the Internet alongside conventional resources.

Immediately it was obvious that Internet users are overwhelmingly from the so-called developed countries of the world. The Internet is more diverse than traditional media, but still not diverse enough. To work around this we are using two service providers (organisations who offer Internet connections). GreenNet specialises in getting groups from southern countries on-line. It gives access to a more genuinely global community, and is less bogged down in irrelevant chat, but it is expensive for general browsing. Research Machines is the main schools provider and offers reasonable rates. It also filters out unwelcome material.

We found that a key management problem was lack of time. To enable all students on the network to connect to the Internet at once an expensive Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) connection is needed. While this is a key element in the school’s IT development plans, financial constraints limit Internet access to a single computer. Groups must take it in turns.

The Internet holds a vast amount of information. You have to search for what you want. Students seemed to pick up this vital skill quickly. Even so, they needed time to look through their search results, follow up suggestions and sort the really useful from the merely interesting. It is hard to go through this process in half an hour, frustrating when you might not get another chance to search for a week or so. On top of this, the technology is still unreliable. The software is bugged, connections fail (once due to bolts of lightning).

Despite the problems, students were glad of the opportunity to try out the Internet. They were curious, and the process started interesting discussions about censorship and the reliability of information.

This half-term we are focusing the work more. The class teacher has selected homelessness and changes in South Africa as topics for everyone to cover. Development education staff are doing the initial searching, so that students can get useful information and contacts faster. We plan to put software on the school’s own network to help students do preparatory work without being on the Internet.

A danger we will need to avoid is insulating students from the Internet, so that they never get a sense of its immediacy and community. We plan to join two newsgroups used regularly by young people from the US, Canada and Europe. Cherwell students will quickly be able to join in this international conversation about young people’s concerns.

It’s early days, but the technology is developing fast. To make the most of the Internet teachers need support. Development educationists are finding ways to provide it.

For more information on the Internet, contact Alison Norris by e-mail on enquiry@demon.co.uk or odec@gn.apc.org or by telephone on 01865 790490