`Gilding the Grid': the marketing of the National Grid for Learning.

The article explores the emerging discourse of the National Grid for Learning (NGfL) by examining examples of marketing and promotional materials produced by the British industry and government. The NGfL initiative was introduced in October 1997, via the consultation document Connecting the Learning Society, detailing plans to connect all of Great Britain's 30,000 schools to the Internet by the year 2002. establishing on-line educational resources centers as well as large-scale training programs for 450,000 teachers. The financing of this scheme was announced to be a blend of public and private money, with the actual construction and maintenance of the NGfL heavily reliant on commercial interests. One of the earliest marketing images of the NGfL appeared as the front cover of Connecting the Learning Society; the government's consultation document detailing the initiative. Here, four circular pictures cascade down the page, gradually increasing in the size. The first portrays some Egyptian hieroglyphs, then a portion of medieval script followed by some metallic printing blocks. The final, largest image depicts a small, smiling girl pointing at a computer screen with banks of switches and other computer screens in the background. The Plato on the Internet shows two digitized planets closely orbiting each other in a scene evocative of countless science-fiction space films. The ethereal face of Plato looks knowingly on to the left of the picture as a bright light emerges from behind the smaller of the two planets. Whereas the Connecting the Learning Society imagery was keen to stress the NGfL historical origins, the Plato advertisement adopts the opposite approach, firmly alluding to the futuristic role of the Internet in education via its outer-space iconography.