As I read the suggestions from many countries about what the GTU -- the Global Telecommunications University -- should be like, I approve of and commend the fundamental objective of bringing higher quality education to developing countries. I worry with reason that, if the deprived people of Asia, Africa, Latin America and North America's urban slums and reservations cannot be given job skills required for the information age, we human beings may destroy our earth through pollution, wars and terrorism; through an inability to overcome unemployment and hunger; through a failure to cope with new diseases like Ebola and AIDS and through our inability to solve still other problems. Humanity must find a way to enable every able-bodied person in the world to earn a decent living, and I see no way for that to be possible except through a global electronic education system.
Indeed, because of ideas like the GTU or the Utsumi projects, it may be possible to achieve this dream, this hitherto impossible goal, for the first time in history. However, each of the interesting current proposals for exchanging education from continent to continent focuses too much on "teaching to" rather than "learning with", even though often this is not the intention. One helpful way to correct this and to accomplish the objective of adequate education for all is to put a new emphasis on research. The university is not just teaching and learning with new global-scale tools now being applied to exciting new possibilities.
First, there must be a style of learning together -- teacher and student -- in which we all do research together. The National Geographic KidsNet Program was a first to model that this is possible, even with very young children. It encouraged a kind of "hands on" research that children could do, research which would not only help bring excellence into their education, but also which would make a positive contribution to science (in that particular case, by gathering samples of acid rain on a scale that scientists working in that area could not otherwise afford). Just as information technology transforms many work tools in the office and the factory, I foresee them empowering and transforming educational instruments so that every learner is also a researcher.
Second, the major problems and needs of the world -- hunger; disease; need for employment through small scale entrepreneurship; the challenge of finding and creating new products; developing ways to offer grand-scale medical services; the need to end violence as a way of solving problems; pollution of air, soil and water, among other problems -- can probably never be solved until hundreds of millions of people (maybe billions of learners) are drawn into the research process: "collective research" plus "collective intelligence" as many minds on all continents are brought together on a global scale to help work on global-scale problems. I dream of a "collective imagination" that develops new ideas that no one person, no one research team, will ever conceive of alone.
We see appearing before our eyes the new computer-empowered tools to make this possible. So I hope those working on GLOSAS projects, on the Global Telecommunications University and on all such projects enlarge their vision with great dreams, dreams equal to the task and the tools. Educational software already lags far behind the hardware, and this is especially true in research empowerment instruments. I commend the work of the GTU team in Ohio and express the hope that they will now, along with others, seek to enlarge their vision of research, of what and how.
Parker Rossman grossman@mail.coin.missouri.edu
author, Emerging Worldwide Electronic University, Praeger, 1993.
3 Lemon Drive, Columbia MO 65201
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June, 1995
GLOSAS NEWS was orinally posted to the WWW at URL: http://library.fortlewis.edu/~instruct/glosas/cont.htm by Tina Evans Greenwood, Library Instruction Coordinator, Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado 81301, e-mail: greenwood_t@fortlewis.edu, and last updated May 7, 1999. By her permission the whole Website has been archived here at the University of Tennessee server directory of GLOSAS Chair Dr. Takeshi Utsumi from July 10, 2000 by Steve McCarty in Japan.