Reconstructing the Tower of Babel: e-education in/and English as the global language

In this paper I address the question of the influence of English as a global language upon education, particularly e-education. In doing so I look at the fragility of language as a cultural construct, the historical background to the dominance of Eurowestern knowledge models and the questions of e-curriculum development as one of aggregation or disintegration. Utilising postcolonial theory, I also survey the effects upon indigenous languages of the emergence of the dominant British Empire over the last five centuries with particular reference to Chinua Achebe. I discuss how this move towards a geographic monolanguage of English has been made even more potent by the colonisation of cyberspace by English as the global language. I employ a postmodernist/feminist poetics methodology that I describe as ‘a subjective academic narrative’ that tells my personal researched story of how this paper enters into and contributes to the privileged academic discourse it addresses.