Bari, Italy has seen the establishment of WAUSE, the World Association for the Use of Satellites in Education, the primary task of which is to promote distance education and training through the use of satellites and other modern communications technologies. Many organizations worldwide, both in the field of education and in that of satellites, have come to form part of the association.
The promoter behind the creation of WAUSE has been the Community of Mediterranean Universities (CMU), with its 128 universities in countries all around the Mediterranean, which is working to establish communications infrastructures and university-level distance courses in this region.
This, however, is but one of the numerous projects of cooperation, both of a national and a worldwide character, that was presented and discussed during the two-day conference "Satellites for Global Education" held at the Sheraton Nicolaus Hotel, Bari and at Tecnopolis, Valenzano. Participants included some of the most eminent experts in the field, some of whom are members of WAUSE. Dr. De Blasi announced that a Global Lecture Hall course will be given as part of a conference on computer architecture, organized by the Faculty of Engineering of Lecce University for the coming October (for which see Dr. Utsumi's article, above). The conference will be transmitted by satellite to universities in the Mediterranean, as well as to others in Europe and in the USA. Receiving sites will be able to interact with Lecce by using a variety of means, ranging from full-motion video to slow-scan and compressed video or simple audio, and they will have at their disposal the use of electronic-mail on computer networks.
This is the first Global Lecture Hall with Italy as its center; and thanks to the constant support given by Telespazio and SIP, it gave us the chance to bring together people from all over the world and especially those of the Mediterranean region, and so realize a real exchange of knowledge between them -- the knowledge to be shared between peoples is now rightly seen as being the most valuable resource in the world today.
Through the work and efforts of its members, WAUSE will try to establish such exchanges as definitive and constant channels between peoples in order to provide bodies like the CMU with the facilities for the functioning of a real distance university. This will clear the way for real development in participating countries, even in the sector of permanent education and training, in business and in industry.
Professor Mario De Blasi
President
World Association for the Use of Satellites in Education (WAUSE)
School of Engineering
University of Lecce
Via Prov. per Arnesano
I-73100 Lecce, ITALY
Bitnet: DEBLASI@LECCE.INFN.IT
Span: 40128::DEBLASI>>
Ed. Note: The above article originally appeared in Open and Distance Learning (Vol.1, Issue 2, July-August 1991), a newsletter of The Electronic University and is being redistributed by permission of its editor (and GLOSAS member), Mr. J. Ross.
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URL: http://fortlewis.edu/~instruct/glosas/wause11.html
November 1991 -- Presented via the World Wide Web March 1999 by
Tina Evans Greenwood, Library Instruction Coordinator, and Mark Deavors, Library Instruction Assistant,
Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado
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.