GLOBALIZATION, INFORMATION COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES AND SCHOLARSHIP IN NIGERIA: CAPACITY-BUILDING IN ICT INTEGRATION IN EDUCATION FOR TEACHERS AND LEARNER

The paper examines the relevance of globalization and ICT to scholarship in Nigeria. It argues that technological progress goes hand in hand with globalization at all levels of society. Even though globalization and ICT may not be age mates; they are “play mates ” and “bed fellows” in development issues. In other words, ICT and Globalization though two different phenomena (each with its own history and its own trajectory), are now, however, closely associated or linked by the vagaries of history and the imperatives or compelling influences of the new “consciousness industry ”. It has been observed that whereas globalization aims at unifying the world systems to put man's life at its best and makes his environment “most worth living ” for him, ICT is the pivot and the dynamo that energizes the process. The distractions and attendant bottlenecks notwithstanding, globalization and ICT have the potential to dramatically transform, reshape and turn around the ways in which people organize their lives, interact with one another and participate in issues affecting the society in the various spheres including scholarship. These twin- necessary evils, the paper asserts, have come to stay and so there is hardly anything anybody can do but to devise strategies for coping with the situation rather than merely enduring the pains. It is against this background that the paper proposes a step by step capacity-building in ICT integration in education, identifies the challenges that come with development in the "consciousness industry ” as engineered by globalization and ICT, and suggests strategies for managing or coping with the challenges.