These shifts will affect how we create meanings, messages and information for the proliferating electronic networks that now surround us. We will also have to re-examine how ideas circulate and how learning and knowledge can be acquired within a digital context. In fact, learning, as we have traditionally defined it, needs no longer be located within particular or specialized institutions. Learning now becomes an activity of problem solving applied to every aspect of daily life. The conjuncture of computers, networks, lifelong learning and a vast array of new tools for human interaction variously described through the tropes of the virtual and the cyberspatial, means that teachers will have to reinvent themselves.
Virtual spaces generate hybrid environments for the interaction of people and computers.
As we negotiate new relationships with these emerging technologies, we are defining new spaces for learning. This paper will explore the landscape of the virtual and examine whether the many different claims being made for the utility of cyberspace as a learning environment are realizable or, in fact, needed. In the international arena, the debate concerning Africa has gone from Afro-pessimism to the effects of globalization on the local economies of the continent. For Africa not to be marginalized in the 21st century, it has to devote the bulk, if not all, of its resources to the development of its human potential. It can be argued that a new emphasis on science and technology related thinking skills and attitudes is key to the success of that choice.