For many years Parker Rossman’s research has been devoted to "the nature and future of the university." He wrote a series of books to challenge the education of several major professions. Now in this decade he is completing a trilogy of books on hopes for the university in this space age, actually the future of higher education in all of its dimensions.

The first of the three was THE EMERGING WORLDWIDE ELECTRONIC UNIVERSITY; subtitled: INFORMATION AGE GLOBAL HIGHER EDUCATION.

The third, beginning with the individual learner, will examine two promising possibilities for expanding creativity and brainpower: by developing profiles of each person's needs, interests, talents, opportunities and problems; and electronic aids to help each develop personal "knowledge constructs" in the context of the international community, the nation, the district or city and vocational goals.

The second--in June 1999 published on the world wide web for discussion in advance of a print edition--is RESEARCH ON CRISES: STILL PRIMITIVE? Those last two words 'still primitive' are in the title to suggest that we hardly know yet what is to be built in cyberspace, this 'public commons' of an emerging international society, this global electronic communications system which is drawing all of the world's peoples into a community of communities. Also all higher education into a community of universities?.

http://www.swan.cbl.umces.edu/CrisisResearch/

A graduate of the University of Oklahoma (education and communications), the University of Chicago (thesis on sociology of the university), and Yale University (Ph.D. in Higher Education), Rossman was founding vice-president and is executive consultant to GLOSAS/USA which conducts tests of global distance education technology and which sponsored the fall 1999 University of Tampere conference on a global University System. In that capacity and as a member of the board of directors of the 'University of the World' (which had councils in twenty-six countries to bring business, government and higher education together to plan for the future of electronic higher education), he pressed these organizations to focus more on research to solve fundamental human problems. He is a founding member of the board of USA (virtual) University and has taught at Yale, and on sabbaticals at Central Philippines University and Balamand in Lebanon. Among many other things he has been a William Henry Hoover lecturer at the University of Chicago, has lectured at the Indian Institute of World Culture in Bangalore, has been a Vocations Week lecturer at Cambridge (UK), and is author of sixteen books including AFTER PUNISHMENT WHAT?; HOSPICE: NEW MODELS OF CARE FOR THE TERMINALLY ILL; FAMILY SURVIVAL and COMPUTERS: BRIDGES TO THE FUTURE.

Keywords

Future of global higher education, vision; global-scale research, technology and higher education, global distance education research on research, redesign and future of universities

In the context of changes that are likely to come into higher education as a result of the convergence of information age technologies, this paper discusses one of many possible scenarios for the restructuring of the university, especially in cyberspace. The redesigned or restructured university will begin, by this scenario, with a global consortium in cyberspace, above or beyond the existing university. Change will come slowly on campus but will accelerate in cyberspace. A global consortium will not replace the conventional university organization into schools, departments and course subjects nor reduce the number of faculty positions because of global distance education (GDE) or distributed education. (On that term, see Hawkins 1999) Both conventional campus and distributed and distance education will continue to exist side by side. Variety will continue.

A colloquium like this can be a first step in the process of developing alternative blueprints for the architecture of a global university system in cyberspace, and for any university as it participates in an emerging global higher education system. No one yet knows what it will be. We can be sure, however, that its designers and builders will encounter many surprises along the way. It is likely that nearly everyone in the higher education community will have a hand in creating and operating the global system.

Just now, therefore, as I begin a journey of exploration you should envisage me as riding a donkey along a jungle footpath. In coming decades, however, that donkey will become a space ship, that footpath much more than an international electronic highway. We must now prepare for that journey into a cyberspace future, yet how can we have road maps in space?. And how can we create blueprints until we know what we should build? (For a more thorough understanding of cyberspace see Barbatsis 1999.)

A space ship as metaphor can remind us (a) of new technologies yet to come, technologies we cannot yet even imagine. Even those fantastic technologies must not drive education. New ones should be designed especially for education, for learning, for achieving global goals yet to be established.. (b) A space ship also reminds us also that higher education--the world university system is going: into at least three kinds of space: outer space, inner space and cyberspace. Now for a moment please close your eyes and enter cyberspace. We are there. We are not just in a meeting room. We are in cyberspace also. The sound waves around us is full of music, although we need a radio to hear it. The air around us is full of films but we need a television set to see them. The air around us is full of voices, but we need a cell phone to interact with those voices. Cyberspace is full of university lectures and courses. On the Internet and the World Wide Web is a vast library of information. So we are already here in cyberspace.

With us in cyberspace are six billion other people; soon perhaps ten billion; illiterate people in the rain forest of Brazil, and some of the most disadvantaged, underprivileged people in the world in remote jungles. Universities have been sending courses to sailors isolated on ships and now are preparing to send courses to astronauts on the space platform; and by the end of 21st century to people exploring other planets? (Ionnota 1999)..

Even the least-educated people are also right now surrounded by all that music, those voices, the drama, the news, the dialogs, vast stores of data and information. It is there for them to use, not some time in the future, but right now. Oh, most do not yet have the technology, the 'personal communication units (PCUs) which bring together cell phones, computers, two-way broadband digital satellites, gigabit wideband ethernet over copper telephone wires, digital radio and more to come. Skeptics say Africans will not have such interactive technology for decades. John Perry Barlow, however, provides evidence that they may leap ahead of us; that the women of Africa may move more quickly into cyberspace, one of many unexpected surprises ahead for those of us who use wires and cables to connect. (See and Gerschemfeld 1999).

It is urgent that we do not limit our planning to existing technology. Already there are rooms in which you can see and talk with people thousands of miles away as if they are in the same room with you. What will be possible when we have the billion channel universe, when we have the molecular computer--which operates at the speed of lightning--inside of every learning tool? And what about virtual reality, holography and thousands of other new technologies? The promise of a wireless connected world--which can make the developing world universities equal partners--is close to being realized. And if a global consortium would agree on the standards for the now being developed (Guttag 1999) inexpensive PCU 'learning tool'--combining TV, computer, pager, cell telephone internet connections and much more, it could even now be mass-produced to make it affordable.

The World Wide Web is our path now through a confusing jungle of exploding knowledge and technologies. Indeed, Gerschenfeld says, the Web may be just the trigger to set off much larger explosions in the 21st century. However, there are proposals and experiments which suggest possible maps and architectures for cyberspace..

There are and will be many other scenarios or blueprints, but universities first need a new and larger vision as a basis for deciding what to do together. Educators must develop the blueprints for a research structure, a teaching/learning structure, and an administrative structure in cyberspace. We should enlarge our vision to include a GRAND DESIGN for global higher education in the space age. Make no small plans, it has been said, for they have no power to move minds. As Berners-Lee, who gets credit for designing the Web has said, the global village idea remind us that "'the world is a unit of shared responsibility."

We asked at NASA (the USA space program) if anyone there had ever taken seriously the jibe that "if we can put a man on the moon why can't we use the same large-scale teamwork to solve major problems on earth?" Yes, we were told, the first director of NASA gave a series of lectures (Webb 1969) at Columbia University in which he foresaw the emergence of "a new breed of scholar" and of much larger-scale research on humanity's issues. The space program, he said, can be a model for systems now needed "in programs for undeveloped regions ... where large-scale endeavors are required."

Also, society has reached a point, Webb said, "where even its survival increasingly depends on our ability to organize the complex and do the unusual." This often may require huge aggregations of resources and many minds in linked teamwork. Great social problems confront humanity, he said. For example, we cannot save vast sprawling urban centers without the effective application of new knowledge, large resources and a diversity of skills drawn from many disciplines. The same is true in ecology, the population crisis and feeding the world. "Piecemeal attacks simply will not work," he said.

Almost limitless opportunities are open to human society and higher education, Webb said, because of new technology that "is the decisive event of our time." We now have a proven means to do "what we have hardly ever dreamed of before." Where oceans, the atmosphere and outer space were previously thought of separately, we now see they are all part of one cosmic system.

For the first time we have the means to understand and reshape great human systems. "The knowledge we have now staggers the imagination," he said. Our technology and the pool of highly educated people "make it possible to accomplish almost any task." What has been in a short time accomplished in aeronautics and space point the way to what we can do in other areas if we only make the effort. The great advances in science, he said, are associated with its grand conceptions even more than with its discoveries." In that context, traditional academic research and teaching structures are inadequate, yet what can replace them? Webb reported the need for "adaptive, problem-solving, temporary systems of diverse specialists, linked together... in organized flux."

Isn't the emerging higher education consortium in cyberspace the place to begin? Global-scale crises often require researchers to collaborate beyond the specializations that have made great advances possible in the industrial age. To fulfill their future role in a global society, Webb said, universities must recognize the need to become much more than trusted sources of knowledge. They can no longer stand aloof from society's fundamental needs. He mentioned DeToqueville's worry about what would happen "when the issues ... are too complex for general understanding" and pointed out that we have new capacities for dealing with complexity; for example, in studying the weather of the planet in the context of the whole universe.

NASA has not only needed to depend on many universities, it also needed for universities to enlarge their research vision. We need a holistic vision, connecting expertise in economic analysis, agriculture, geography, political science, anthropology, law, sociology, ecology, and much more. Is it too radical to suggest, for the long run, that research which effects the entire planet should involve scholars in all nations?

Yet, even in the elite universities of the developed world many people do not act as if aware of the revolutionary changes about to take place. The pessimists are going to be surprised at how soon new technologies give unanticipated power to those in the poorest areas of the world. Illustrations can be found in the online documentation of agencies--such as UNESCO, NASA, the World Bank and the ITU--that monitor the global scene."

A symposium on "Friends of the Mind"' was held at one of the world's largest libraries in June, 1999, to ask what might happen in the next century in 24 areas of broad human study, such as cosmology, moral philosophy, physics and city planning. The American Librarian of Congress, James Billington. said it was his intention "'to turn academia loose on larger questions." He saw academic scholars as "increasingly preoccupied with giving definitive answers to trivial questions." H. G. Wells said, early in this century, that "our... universities ... float above our global problems like a lovely sunset over a battlefield."

By contrast, a problem-focused university consortium in cyberspace can do the opposite. (Sinnott 1996). Its mission would be "to work towards the solution of worldwide global problems," seen and unforeseen crises. Online research with a particular focus would become "the building blocks of transition to the multisite problem-focused university." It would be "dispersed physically and joined electronically." This scenario focuses on the need for a visionary 'thoughtful big picture,' as big as cyberspace, --which is endless. An "international problem-focused university requires freedom to operate across borders (national and disciplinary) for everyone's good." It may require negotiated agreements to give the virtual university a type of diplomatic immunity or "international waters status."

A Yale Graduate School Dean, in his book on the "idea of the university" (Pelikan 1992) pointed out that universities in fact are increasingly involved in humanity's great crises. Universities have, for example, greatly reduced famine through the 'green revolution' which resulted from collaboration between arts and sciences (plant genetics) and a professional school (agriculture.) Also Dean Pelikan says, great advances in health care assumed that the entire university, not just a hospital or medical school, must be involved in preventive health care research. The same thing is true in ecology and other crises.

If higher education is to be at the center of a renaissance in cyberspace, a global consortium might state its visionary goals and agenda as these:

Universities--with such a vision--can plan joint research and global teaching projects to find out what things to do as well as political means to accomplish them. Historian Paul Kennedy (1993) says that the greatest test facing humanity is how to use the power of technology to find effective ways to free billions of people from starvation and other crises. Can we use technologies on the scale of orbiting space satellites for dealing with the human social universe also? Which existing universities could do that alone?

You have probably read criticisms of the June 1999 conference at Budapest on "Science for the 21st Century," sponsored by UNESCO and the International Council for Science. Ideally, the Economist report said, such a conference would ask how science could continue its job as a benefactor of humanity. But the lectures failed to tackle the problems of the next century that had been defined as a major focus of the conference: "poverty, ill health, environmental degradation and "the waste of potential due to discrimination against women." Not one of the 25 specialist sessions was devoted to the impact of information technology. We should learn some important lessons from that, such as.
(http://www.gvn.co.uk/wcs.htm)

First, that poverty, ill health, environmental degradation and our other 21st century crises are not going to be solved by science alone, although university developments in science are crucial. Nor are devastating human crises going to be solved by any one discipline or any one scholar or small team of scholars alone. Not by science alone because the major barriers to resolving such crises are political, moral, and social attitudes. Humanity can provide adequate food and health care for all the children in the world as soon as the political will exists. The essential funding is also a political problem. So meeting food and medical needs may be more a problem for social studies and the humanities than for medical and agricultural researchers alone.

A second lesson is that humanity's major problems cannot be dealt with by little bits and pieces of uncoordinated research, scattered over the university and all over the world. None of these major global crises can be coped with separately. They are all inter-related. Reporting on the first World Conference on Transdisciplinarity, sponsored by UNESCO in 1994, Tony Judge (1997) of the International Union of Associations understood the word to mean 'beyond interdisciplinary.' (More in Appendix A) Illustrations abound of real world problems defying every attempt to be tackled by a single discipline." (SCR 1994)

On the other hand, interrelated consortia of universities can make it possible for scholars to cooperate more effectively with colleagues in their own and other fields around the world as, for example, does "an ecumenical movement in the biological and earth sciences". (Cleveland 1993) It brings together disciplines that had been focusing separately on the atmosphere, the oceans, agriculture, geology, geophysics and outer space. Also those studying society: "economists, political scientists, social psychologists are hurrying to catch up. The necessity for global-scale teamwork does not reduce the important contributions of individual researchers or of small teams in one country. Rather it will make it possible for individuals and teams to be linked so that their findings can be placed in the proper index of global data bases and become a part of a larger coordination and sharing of research, as in the Human Genome Project.

Some insight into such mega-research (defined in Appendix F) is reported in The New Production of Knowledge for which the Swedish Council on Research was a sponsor (cited here as SCR 1994). That team called the traditional style of research, 'Mode One'. It attempts problem-solving within one discipline and often without a practical goal. Mode Two may not be replacing Mode One but is enlarging it. Mode Two seeks to develop knowledge to meet a defined need of humanity and continues the research until the need is met. It is Action/ Research which draws upon all disciplines to solve a crisis. Mode Two is an overlay to traditional research methodology. It is "transdisciplinary rather than mono-or multidisciplinary. Also, the report says, it is not being organized primarily within existing university structures since it often involves partnership with government and industry and is becoming more socially accountable. (More in Appendix F)

With a larger vision, each existing university, each discipline or department, could select one or more areas of expertise to share with all others (Schwartz and Leyden 1997) ""to assume responsibility for a piece of the digitalization of all literature in that field." Who can be an expert in more than pieces of a larger puzzle? A scholar at the USA National Science Foundation (Molnar 1997) confronts us with some frightening statistics about the jungle of data which will take centuries to understand if we are limited to our present methods for coping with such vast data. He finds that "it would take 22 centuries to read the annual biomedical research literature." Surely he meant 22 years? No, he said, it would take seven centuries to read one year's chemical literature alone. How can any one researcher or helpful librarian cope with that? Who at this time is even willing to guess how long it will take to interpret and make available the vast data which orbiting satellites and telescopes are bringing from outer space? How long must we wait to bring together disciplines for a holistic approach to our physical and social universe?

The existing Internet search engines have mapped, and can find, only about sixteen percent of the knowledge that is already out there in digital form. So the door to the Internet, the first road map through its jungle, should be an encyclopedia with definitive articles on every subject and every sub-section of every subject. Then every idea and sentence in that great cosmic electronic encyclopedia should have electronic footnotes (World Wide Web addresses) to every source, to every scholar working in that area, to every argument pro and con, to every unanswered question that needs research. It will be more than any encyclopedia yet imagined.

Levy (1997) says that the World Wide Web and other technologies now make it possible to speak of a cosmospedia in which everything might be interlinked with everything. We must put aside the mental picture of encyclopedia as a shelf of books and expand our minds to think of a living, growing, holistic, everchanging hypertext system which includes all verifiable knowledge and all questions that need research. Every scholar will argue with it, propose corrections, add footnotes. Such a cosmopedia will be one of the structures we need in cyberspace to put universe back into the university.

In each university's areas of cyberspace specialization, global distance learning (GDL) courses would be prepared for sharing with the whole world; and also course modules would be prepared for downloading into any course anywhere. A greatly needed map is a comprehensive online catalog of all courses available on the Internet, Web or via telecommunications. Unless the catalog provides objective evaluation of each course, students will find themselves exploring the web as "hunters and gatherers" in nomad societies.

Researcher Albert Bork, http://www.ics.uci.edu/~bork as he contemplates the drastic changes that information technology will bring into higher education, says we must (a) to begin with a vision and (b) create new learning models (based on larger-scale research on how we learn (inner space.) What use, however, is a vision if you do not have a long-range plan for accomplishing it; without solid experimentation and continuing evaluation of "new learning models?" We can more thoroughly think through the consequences of all we do. We can better learn from our failures instead of just touting our successes.

Also, before we are overwhelmed with the complexities of human cultures and the size of the world's population, we must also take adequate account of the small picture: the local community, the individual student, the problems, values and culture of family and neighborhood. Probably every neighborhood school in the world should become an educational counseling center to help people of all ages find and use appropriate electronic courses.

Bork's vision begins with the necessity for lifelong learning for everyone in the world. Everyone, everywhere, at every stage of life; and not just minimum literacy and skill training for all, but the development of creativity, critical thinking and problem solving skills. Also his vision allows for no 'passing grades," but a mastery education in which everyone's grade is 100%, mastering each subject or skill with excellence before proceeding to the next Bork is not just dreaming. He discusses what is now possible.

(See http://www.math.vt.edu/people/rossi/mathemporium.ppt)

Unfortunately we are being rushed into global distance learning (GDL) before we have adequate research and administration ready in cyberspace. Present efforts at 'distance education' are primitive. We are at the stage of preliminary exploration, many trying to reproduce in cyberspace what we do in traditional classrooms. Quality varies and evaluation is limited. Nevertheless many major universities are plunging in to swim in the chaotic waters. For example, in June 1999 Columbia University in New York announced that--as a for-profit venture--its 'core content' will be on the Internet, available to learners anywhere in the world. We are likely to confront a muddle of courses available, thousands of competitive courses become tens of thousands and may become hundreds of thousands.

The dominant old model is the classroom lecture in a course which is not yet multidisciplinary or truly interactive. We all know the joke about a process by which the notes of the teacher get into the notes of the student without engaging the mind of either one. Breaking free from entrenched ways requires more than re-doing what has been done before. Also the Y2K problem reminds us of the danger of improvisation and delay.

(See http://bates.cstudies.ubc.ca/carnegie/carnegie.html)

Steve Jobs, who led in the development of computers especially designed for students and teachers, warns that computers or no other technology can fix the education system. Only people can do that, and often with low-tech solutions.

Nor is the Internet as yet adequate for a transformed learning system. Alan Kay says that to try to adapt for education the technology prepared for business and other purposes is like trying to play music on an adding machine. So rather than asking what a university can do with the Internet, Web and emerging new technologies, we must first decide what must be done, and then create special new technologies. (See Appendix C on tools to empower learners.) If a major goal of education is to develop creative and skilled brains, then one place to begin will be on brain research for learning styles. (See Appendix B) For example, experimentation with Gardner's seven kinds of intelligence creates teams of students to work on a project that requires all seven kinds.

(http://www.newhorizons.org/trm_1wilson1.htm and other essays there.)

Then students with verbal skills can come to appreciate those with artistic gifts. Bork's web page reports successful experimentation with new learning styles, for example see the SCIENTIFIC REASONING project. Note that Bork's focus is on helping learners become skilled in teaching themselves in each new situation. This means that--in a learner/ teacher/ counselor partnership--instructors learn as much from their students as they teach them. Instructors will say: "half of what I teach will probably be proven false in coming decades" and: "thirty years from now nearly all you will remember from this course is what you taught yourself." The era of one-way, top-down authoritarian lecture teaching is almost over.

The production of new and better knowledge (SCR 1994) will take place "within the cross fertilization among disciplines and cultures." Human society now has global-scale tools to make this possible and effective, at least in cyberspace. Scholars all face the possibility that they will be shoved out of the range of their competence; but large-scale teamwork and the prospects for powerful new research tools are most encouraging.

As historic distance education dissolves into 'distributed education,' it will in time transform the learning styles of students in residence on a campus as well as those who are thousands of miles away. So a GDL consortium must involve research also. New learning styles in cyberspace will be rooted in inner space, maps of the human mind, perhaps of every individual mind (briefly reported in Appendix D. On education for the professions see

http://horizon.unc.edu/TS/commentary/1999-07.asp)

No one yet knows how universities are going to be reshaped by political and economic globalization. What do we do where a blanket of bureaucracy smothers creativity? How can we change internal politics? Will other institutions take over research?

As in the economy, globalization has its negative side. When there is no international governance, laws or administrative system, will global higher education spin off into cutthroat competition? A new style of administration for existing universities, as well as for a global consortium in cyberspace, may emerge from the new opportunities provided by communications technology and because of the desperate needs of universities in the developing nations. No longer will 'top down' national control and administration suffice. New possibilities for cooperation and collaboration on all levels must be explored.

"The 21st century will be full of organizational surprises" (Killman 1989). "Around 1980 the world changed... as a result of the computer and telecommunication revolutions and the explosion of information." What we see, Killman says, is the emergence of "the network" as the 21st century form of institution. At the hub, "the traditional division of labor will be replaced by a contemporary division of knowledge organized according to new categories." The "hub" will be responsible for organizing resources, setting goals, establishing priorities and programs and keeping the network together. That hub shift into the global virtual university may bring to birth entirely new learning and research systems.

GDL is moving many universities worldwide into a competitive business approach. Whether we like it or not, much of education is becoming a not very-well managed global industry. If that turns out to be inevitable, as corporations and publishing houses begin to create virtual universities, perhaps our present universities will become the R&D branch. GDL, however is inevitable. So we need a larger and more adequate vision for a global consortium; not perhaps to manage, but to coordinate; to create an on-line catalog of all available courses along with accrediting institution evaluations of each course. No bureaucracy is available to do these jobs, so perhaps every university must accept a share of the responsibility and acquire course evaluation by independent experts. Of course the University of Lisbon can choose whether or not to give credit towards a degree to a course taken elsewhere. This does not, however, provide counseling and help to the distance education student in Africa who does not know which course to choose, or to the university which does not know which course on the Web --not available locally--to recommend to a student.

How can a global architecture help universities deal with possible cutthroat competition, except by providing channels for negotiation--as between nations--and contractual agreements both global and local? We now see increasing collaboration between business/ employers and the teaching and research programs in universities. To move ahead, however, universities also need a global info-structure. Nations give up some sovereignty in a global society. Universities, professions, individual researchers and disciplines may also lose some sovereignty as a new global higher education system emerges. Somehow educators must design structures for administration of higher education in cyberspace that can enable planetary management without endangering personal freedom and rights. A model may be plans for political world governance by linking local governments and organizations. (UNESCO 1995)

MIT Professor Negroponte (1997) points out three effects of going digital on the shape of our institutions. It decentralizes, it flattens and it makes things bigger and smaller at the same time. Just as elevators changed the shape of buildings, he says, and as automobiles have changed the shape of cities, so now digital bits will change the shape and structure of all human institutions. The change in how higher education is organized and administered, at every level--disciplinary, college, university, national education structures, global consortia--will be affected (as drastically as we are affected “by the force of gravity;”) especially our centralized authoritarian structures.

http://www.media.mit.edu/TTT/visiom.htm

Cyberspace, he says, is more biological. When he says its administration is being flattened, he means that there are fewer levels of control. When he says our structures will be larger and smaller at the same time, he means that we must be big to deal with global problems, but at the same time it must be small and personal. "It is hard to imagine that our highly structured and centralized world will morph into a planet full of loosely connected physical and digital communities, but it will." So, he says, it is crucial that we now plan carefully how and how well we can coordinate "'this new mass individualization." Universities are already experimenting with many ways to provide education for all, counseling and evaluation for all, at all ages of life. Probably the only way we can develop standards and criteria and new forms of cooperation will be on our powerful new communication networks.

Can hundreds of thousands of educators, even millions really collaborate? Don't "'too many cooks spoil the broth?" Fortunately, the bright people responsible for the networking structure are creating something enormous, even marvelous. Small teams, both local or connected internationally, can be linked to work together on much larger projects.

Universities have a great stake in the elimination of poverty, especially intellectual poverty. Universities need money to do great things. And it is now within humanity's grasp to bring taxable wealth to everyone in the world; for wealth is no longer gold and land and machines. Wealth is now information and ideas which can be expanded endlessly, enough for everyone to grow rich. At least rich in what is really essential and important.

After years of stagnation the prospects for transforming the university are astonishingly good; not merely because of driving technology but because of empowered social energies. The universities in the developing world are being brought into the net, which means that they can be partners in the development of long-range plans and strategy in global higher education. Education will be "the next industrial era institution to go through a compete overhaul" the driving force being the need of the emerging information age for workers with creative, well-developed brains. (Schwartz and Leyden 1997) The existing educational system "is simply not up to the task." The last great educational renaissance was not the work of a few brilliant educators but of hundreds of thousands of people "who threw themselves into the problem." The Internet and Web can enliven such a process for the next round, but new and networking styles of university administration must clear the way to replace assembly-line education with personalized, one-to-one relationships.

There is no conclusion to a 45-minute exploratory journey which is just beginning. We need to keep our minds open and must continually enlarge a vision with other scenarios. Maybe we need a warning system; that all of our experiments should be labeled: "may be dangerous to higher education, to science, to scholarship, to learning, to the future of the human race." If you think you or I know what is going to happen in cyberspace you are very wrong. Will we keep harking back to a past that can never be recovered as the unstoppable winds of global change overwhelm us? Or will educators begin now to prepare themselves for a future they have so far lacked the courage and vision to claim? (Have I any recommendations? See Appendix C).)

"The gargantuan problem of the (21st) Century is how to settle down our species before we wreck the planet. Humanity is in a state of denial right Now." (Bennett 1998)

"Educators constantly underestimate how many ideas are waiting to be discovered." Paul Romer

As an additional research effort for this paper I went through 1998-99 issues of Scientific American, Phi Delta Kappan, Educom Review, On the Internet, the Chronicle of Higher Education, George Gilder's ASAP articles on technology in Forbes, and six years of Wired magazine which has been exploring the impact of information age technology on education, politics, music, art, business and nearly all aspects of modern culture. Also I cite: (Recommended citations marked with (*)

*Bailey, James. 1996. After Thought: The Computer Challenge to Human Intelligence. New York: Basic Books.

Barbatsis, Gretchen et al. 1999. http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol5/issuel/

Bennett, Paul. 1998. "'From Ants to Einstein." Wired, April.

Bork, Alfred, "An Interview with Alfred Bork." 1999. Educom Review, July-Aug. - He also shared with me what he is this month saying at a conference like this in Japan.

Bruer, John. 1999. "In Search of Brain-Based Education." Phi Delta Kappan, May.

Cleveland, Harlan. 1993. Birth of A New World. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

Cleveland, Harlan. 1998. "Global Opportunities for the New Century." Futurist, Nov.

Corey, E.R. 1997. Technology Fountainheads. Cambridge: Harvard University.

Culpepper, J, 1993, "Sooner Spotlight." Sooner magazine, Summer.

Darnton, Ronbert. 1999. "A Historian of Books Lost and Found in Cyberspace." - Chronicle of Higher Education, Mar. 12.

*Daniel, John. 1988. Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media. Logan: Kogan Page.

Davidson, Cathy 1999. "What If Humanities Scholars Worked Together in a Lab. " - Chronicle ofHigher Education, May 22.

Dertouzos, Michael. 1999. "The Future of Computing." Scientific American, August.

Gordon, Barbara, 1996. "Java, A New Brew for Educators." Educom Review, Mar.

Gubernick, Lisa et al. 1997. "1 Got My Degree Through E-mail." Forbes, June 16. Zachary, G.P. 1997. "The Godfather." Wired, November.

Trandisciplinarity, Judge says, is an important concept for scholars who must cope with complexity, such as physicists who are "faced with the constraints and limitations of their methodology." Some scholars are concerned with the theoretical integration of disciplines, others with integrative experience. It was clear at a transdisciplinary conference that the fragmentation of the disciplines was failing to serve society in the context of complex global problems. Judge used the metaphor of a choir to ask what it might be like if the various disciplines sang together in harmony. Perhaps, he said, complexity will be understood through "the insightful representation of the arts." A network of urban researchers also uses the term pleuridisciplinary. Wilson (1998) uses the term consilience as he speaks of the urgency of bringing science, arts and the humanities into new collaboration. One that will discover not only what should be done, but also the political means to accomplish it.

Ultimately, of course, it is not organizations and structures that matter most in higher education, but people, the learners, the counselors, the researchers, the instructors and those who manage the new technology for all of us. To paraphrase Alvin Toffler, our scholars are smart but our educational institutions are dumb (no, the 'politically correct' term is 'slow.')

UNESCO and the U.N. University millennium project call for new ideas, pointing out that imagination and creativity are becoming more important than knowledge. (Cleveland 1998) 1 hope in the third book of my trilogy on the future of the university to discuss in more detail two promising possibilities for expanding the creativity and brain power of every learner: (a) the development of a profile of each unique learner, and (2) aids to help individuals develop their own personal "knowledge constructs" (KC) to organize all that they know so thal it is available and useful for each new project throughout a lifetime.

Also, electronic textbooks (see Gerschenfeld 1999) can be customized to the individual and they need never be replaced but can regularly be updated. When teaching about the heart they can include illustrations of a moving, beating heart from all angles. And most important, they can provide continual feedback for revision. The learner becomes a partner in improving the textbook. Learners enter with a need to be led, need help in setting the goals that can help them keep a sense of direction while following the hypertext flow which can take them in every possible direction.

How do we achieve an understanding of inner intellectual life? Of someone's learning capacity? How do we help students and teachers cope when a student knows more than the teacher in an important area of expertise? Below are introductions to two kinds of learning tools that will transform education.

(A) It is now possible for everyone to have an accessible record of everything they have learned, organized around their own interests, goals, professional plans. I envy the secondary school and university students who today--with their laptop computers--can begin to develop their own personal 'Knowledge Construct.' (KC) This can help them organize and define themselves at a deeper level as it includes all class notes, personal essays and research papers, reading notes, ideas, lectures, journals. I have been reading weekly letters I wrote to my parents, beginning when I went to college. I am surprised to find how I can trace the beginning of ideas, the experiences that later led to vocational and other major decisions.

The KC's should begin at puberty, the period of transformation to more active partnership and participation in learning. Pupils that age are often bored and disruptive unless "'they are treated as individuals with differing interests and learning skills." (Guguelmo 1993) This requires "interactive learning devices that students can pursue at their own pace and that present information in a variety of ways." It then becomes possible to teach the student, holistically, rather than just the subject matter. Then the learner becomes part of the process. The tools not only transform and empower the learning environment, they transform and empower the learner.

When I proposed this KC idea at a brain conference at Princeton a few years ago, one Scottish scholar decided to put his graduate students to work digitalizing all of his papers so that they could be cross-indexed for future generations to build upon. SpinRite (1997) pointed out that existing notebook computers can already keep a record of everything we have ever read or written. Not too far into the 21st century we can carry in our pockets 10 gigabytes "that represent our life's exposure to text." Conviently retrievable, this personal Life-File will also maintain pointers to the Web, enabling an ongoing 'personalization of the global.' Then each person's unique characterization of needs and interests can facilitate searches, communications with others, professional activities and more. Thus there will be two quite different kinds of digital storage, the personal and the global, both alive and growing each day. Data is dead until it is organized into and connected with knowledge (and wisdom.)

This is not some futuristic dream. One student in 1998 told of attending a lecture during which others around her were all connected to the Web. Some were sending and receiving e-mail (about the lecture?) while at the same time they were taking notes on the lecture with a system that automatically stored, cross-references and indexed them in a database which held all their other information on that and related ed topics. In a sense these tools were creating for them a second brain that knew where and when to access and use parts of the lecture.

(B) A unique profile of each individual learner. This may be one of the most crucial developments in education. For example, it might begin with combining each individual's medical and educational records as they grow and develop across the years. New kinds of regular testing are essential to the process, tests linked to electronic textbooks, to neural-based exams which can test problem-solving skills against a model of expert research techniques. (Wired Sept. 1998, "The Quest for the Perfect Test.") The context for this is the work of brain-mapping scientists, philosophers and others who collaborate to create a general theory of cognition. (Bennett 1948) Note the Internet Society's (ISOC) continuing work on security for privacy in such records.

That profile, incorporating all that can be learned about an individual from brain scans, brain research on learning style, and much more--will take into account the fact that each learner has a heart and spirit, as well as mind. Perhaps there should be mega-research on how humanity might better empower moral and ethical actions. Letting children suffer unnecessarily from hunger and diseases is a global-scale moral problem. Research is needed on how to increase compassion, not what to do about a hungry and sick world, but also how to get it done politically; for example, how also to get public support for essential research and action as in ecology. Could larger-scale research find better ways to motivate political leaders and make them more compassionate, honest and responsible? And the public?

Vanniver Bush proposed recording intimate thoughts and "associative trails.' He suggested that this, along with genes, might be another contribution to generations ahead. "'The son will inherit from his father the trails his father followed as his thoughts matured, with his father's comments and criticisms along the way." (Zachary 1997) Scholars have long valued such navigation maps left by earlier travelers along their investigative trail. While "the Internet and Web are as yet incredibly primitive" they are first steps toward a much more sophisticated system for navigating to the flood of information in which individuals are now drowning.

A profile of each unique learner is one answer to a serious problems facing universities; that is the preparation of primary and secondary schools.
www.globallearning.org.

The preparation of personal profiles--as the basis for a program of learning uniquely tailored to each individual-- should begin before kindergarten.

(C) Collective Intelligence tools can be used to help learners create learning communities with those nearby--and thousands of miles away--who share common study interests and can support teach others efforts over short or longer periods of time? And link those communities together (some classes are such communities) in structured, supportive learning environments of the sort required for a truly new age of learning? (See chapter 4, http://swan.cbl.umces.edu/CrisisResearch)

Not so long ago university education was just for a privileged elite and efforts have been made to correct that by 'democratizing the university,' admitting more students than could be taught well. Many classes are so large now that students might as well go to class via the Internet and telecommunications. We now see that bringing a billion new students to campuses is an impossible effort. Helping them learn what they need to know in an information age will require a GDL info-structure. Even the rich state of California has reluctantly come to realize that its present system can never provide education for everyone.

GDL and 'distributed education' are the only hope for the billion students who cannot to come to a residential university. Even if it is not the same quality, there is no other way that human society can afford to provide higher education for all in the next generation who cannot afford or find a place on campus like this

Maybe in time an excellent education can be provided, electronically, to everyone in the world, wherever they are geographically or in age of life, and whatever their need. The technology to make that possible, at reasonable cost, should be in place within two decades. If it is to be well done, however, the very large scale research and experimentation must begin now, not waiting until an unplanned kludge is so entrenched that it will be hard to replace However, we must think of 'design' not as a picture of what it will look like, but as a process of digging deep to see how it can work and how to make it work. As GDL makes "education for all" possible, to use UNESCO's phrase, perceptive educators see that it need not be an either/or situation, either everyone in a residential university or everyone involved in GDL. High quality residential universities will continue for those who can afford to come. And the quality of residential and commuting universities will improve with the use of distributed education modules and telecommunication connections. Pluralism will flourish. Also, we are likely to have more and more specialized universities and residential research institutions. For example, cities will have universities that specialize in the problems of urbanization. Perhaps every university will, among other things, concentrate on one issue or problem and connect electronically with all those researchers, wherever in the world they are, who are working on that problem. There already are such medical seminars online, sponsored by one university which is developing expertise in that area..

Self-teaching can become excellent with living, electronic textbooks. When a consultant at a Canadian university I was impressed by a course where students studied the technical aspects of accounting outside of class, at their own pace. Then they came together in seminars with a professor of accounting to talk about ethical issues, about the problems facing corporations in a changing world. These graduates were in great demand because they had more than accounting skills, they had creative vision

Will the human mental system fail to understand our complex technological society? How can scattered efforts be brought together to produce a rapid change of mind; perhaps even the equivalent, in our human 'social' universe, of the unified theory of everything that cosmologists seek in understanding the physical universe? The potential of networking for collective intelligence is illustrated by the global-scale conferencing that proceeded, facilitated and afterwards continued discussion on whether global poverty might best be overcome by providing distance education to everyone in the world, examining that process to see what might be learned. See www.globalknowledge.org

H.G. Wells over fifty years ago pointed to the wasteful duplication that results from a lack of coordination in research. What Wells proposed then--before computers and the Internet--may have seemed like an unrealistic dream. Now we see it beginning to happen. The telecommunications and Internet which extend education and training worldwide also enlarge the community of researchers. (SCR 1994) Research will become part of all learning in school and on the job, perhaps becoming as essential as learning to think. We cannot really envisage it yet, but perhaps hundreds of thousands of minds can come together to do research on a scale what hitherto has seemed impossible.

An idea which begins in one mind is expanded and enlarged into a truly great idea and project through the interplay of many minds. Then it requires even more minds--in cooperation with technologies--to bring it to completion (Corey 1997) This much has always been true. We already have many global co-laboratories in which scientists and scholars work on research that no one team can do alone. Shaping adventurous science around problems such as environmental issues requires an extended peer community. For example, meteorologist Yoshi Sasaki (Culpepper 1993) began a decade ago to envisage an international consortium dedicated to alleviate the loss of life and property from natural disasters. He anticipated a global multidisciplinary research "natural disaster consortium," related to the mega-research global weather system. He also proposed a spinoff, "a natural disaster industry" which would include telecommunications, insurance, construction, utilities and the manufacture of monitoring devices for communities and families. Hardly anyone realizes how many global-scale projects are in a developmental phase. Tens of thousands of scholars and scientists, scattered all over the world, are at work on bits and pieces of what can add up to some astonishing results.

Students in residence can via telecommunications take any course which is not available where they are. All courses can be greatly enriched by including lectures by leading experts from elsewhere in the world, and downloaded electronic segments/ modules can be used in any course to keep faculty and students informed about the latest developments in a field of study. Most important: teaching will be interactive. Students need guidance, need to have subject matter organized for them, but what they long remember will be what they taught themselves.

The notion that "national science systems have become dysfunctional and need to be overhauled" challenges cherished beliefs and dogmas. The Unesco Courier, May 1999, asks "who owns science" and to what purpose? Humanity, the editorial said, has the right to ask science to give priority to such problems as inequality, injustice, mechanisms of global disruption.

The pure quest for truth regardless of practical applications will continue to be central to research; indeed, may be crucial in the unexpected. The solitary scientist's quest for pure truth in one discipline will no doubt continue where it has always happened. Then also in cyberspace we can shift from curiosity driven to highly complex problem solving priorities. Instead of a single strong flow there will be "cross-currents, eddies, even undertows" caused by economic, political and organizational events; also by shifting intellectual currents and "altered constructions of knowledge." In cyberspace too there can be new forms of pure research that will "marry the expertise of the natural sciences and the social sciences;" research that can play an important role in improving the quality of public policy, decision-making, in managing controversies related to risk and to the externalities of technological development.

Although great individual minds have at times been responsible for spectacular advances, human progress from now on will require a "community of minds." Who else but large transdisciplinary teams an create blueprints for mega-science in cyberspace and for the information age?

What do we mean by mega-research? The term is ambiguous. It can refer to 'big science projects' like the space program; or to the linking and coordination of many piecemeal research projects undertaken by individuals or teams scattered worldwide. It can refer to planned transdisciplinary projects in which government, industry and universities cooperate. We ask: who is to do 'research on research?' which includes the designing blueprints and models for the architecture of new and larger research structures in cyberspace?

"Could not the need for cost and information-sharing provide the conditions for bolder thinking in international terms for more rational use of resources, by reorganizing the international division of labor" in research? (SRC 1994)

Problem-solving teams require the participation of social scientists working alongside lawyers, engineers, natural scientists and politicians. So Mode Two style research represents not just a change in scientific method but a transformation. It calls "into question the adequacy of familiar knowledge producing institutions, whether universities, government research institutions or corporate laboratories." Quality of research is then less determined by its contribution to advancing a scholarly discipline or profession and more toward its solution of defined needs, often political, economic and social. Yet should not every discipline have something to contribute as research assumes a holistic view of the universe? Researchers can continue precise specialities and also contribute to transdisciplinary projects within the global consortium. This report on the future of science says that there must be "a new sensitivity to the broader implications and consequences of research and decisions made as a result of it." There will be political and social implications which require consulting with various concerned groups, and perhaps entire populations and nations. The shape of larger-scale research is determined by a more complex and diverse "set of intellectual and social demands" while also giving "rise to genuine basic research... Therefore it develops its own distinctive theoretical structures, research methods and modes of practice" which belong to no one discipline." Different subject areas and methods are involved in research to solve different kinds of problems, and I ask if this cannot better be done in cyberspace..

Where do Mode Two research findings belong when a transdisciplinary project is completed? Some findings perhaps belong in biology, for example, or in anthropology or engineering or philosophy. To which one discipline, for example, should space exploration be assigned? Peer review becomes more difficult since it is no longer focused on individual or small-team creativity and requires review from peers in more than one discipline for a "wider range of expertise." Traditional Mode One type research is therefore easier to control, manage and evaluate but it leaves many global-scale problems unsolved. Often a scientist or scholar will only at certain times be participating in and contributing to global-scale research projects or may only give some time to complex transdisciplinary problem solving. Theories developed in environmental sciences "in the application mode," for example, "fertilize lines of intellectual advance that live outside disciplinary frameworks."

Mode Two--a response both to science and society--is critically dependent upon emerging computer and communications technologies." It enables close collaboration with experts from a wide range of backgrounds. It creates, the report says, a socially distributed knowledge system that is already a new reality.

We live in an era when research, using powerful new combinations of technology, can help scholars begin to bring fragmented knowledge together so that needed maps and blueprints for larger research can be created. At the same time, Mode One's individual and conventional disciplinary research will long continue to be needed also and the two Modes will continue to interact with one another. It is not only in our era of experimentation in cyberspace that evaluation must become more adequate.

Research on crises, computer simulationist John McLeod reminds us, will require better understanding of how social systems will react to proposed changes. Simulationists can now develop global models as one component of larger research systems and strategies for coping with people who are angry about planetary social systems and a planet which seems to be angry itself. Who, however, is to do the research on how to build essential new collaborative research institutions in cyberspace, (Levy 1997) that move beyond the existing global collaboration among musicians, biologists, historians and so forth.

A conference was held August 9-13, 1999, in Finland "to brainstorm" the establishment of an advanced (wireless and satellite) broadband Internet system to provide electronic distance learning (EDL) in major global regions (the Pacific/Asia, North and South America, and Europe and Africa); and to discuss the infrastructure, contents and the institutionalization and funding of a Global University System which would link regional electronic university systems on each continent. The conference was initiated by Takeshi Utsumi of GLOSAS who has for two decades pioneered in experimenting with and demonstrating technological possibilities. It was funded by the United Nations development program, the World Bank, the Soros Foundation, the USA National Science Foundation, the Pan American Health Organization, the British Council, the Japan Foundation and others. Some of those present wanted satellites devoted exclusively to global education, one of which perhaps would contain a large digital library which could be accessed by anyone in the world. Much of the focus was on global health care and tele-medicine. It is likely that business and entertainment interests will develop the infrastructure with a great deal of the initiative coming from health care proponents.

What does this suggest for Portugal? That while waiting for wireless bandwidth technology, universities should begin to plan together to offer lifelong education to advance the job skills and fulfill the potential of everyone; first at home, then to collaborate with educators in all Portuguese language areas of the world; creating a consortium that will become part of the emerging global consortium which will link and coordinate the many kinds of consortia for electronic distance learning that are appearing in many parts of the world. (i.e., links between the British Open University and the USA Western Governor's virtual university and the consortium of a dozen leading research universities who plan not to duplicate each other's efforts but to divide areas of responsibility.

Also we must question when 'higher education" begins. It is often alleged that primary and secondary schools are not adequately preparing students for the university. Technology empowered 'cradle to the grave' education needs to be seamless, part of one system at least from age 14. 1 have visited a school in the Philippines which has abolished the 7th and 8th grades, so that 13 or 14 year olds begin high school courses and successfully do university work by ages 15 or 16. More important, students need to proceed at their own pace, advancing faster in some subjects than in others. For many, if not all,'higher education' may begin at puberty as learners are given more adult responsibility in school and in the community around them..