Mobile broadband technology doubles in its extension every five years worldwide, every two years in some areas. No technology has ever extended so rapidly in human history. Within this system the University of the World is creating its own structure that will knit together a global campus. Where traditionally campus was created by walkways and buildings, now with the opened door of a computer-in-a-hand, a student almost anywhere joins class and faculty everywhere, not just connecting people in a learning forum, but also accessing the world’s history of scholarship in print, sound, and image.
While there is now a surge of activity to use Information Technologies to support learning, mostly the applications mimic the old classroom or try to simulate reality. The University of the World will certainly utilize that aspect, but it also advances another utilization of technology: connecting the places of and the ability to learn from the world.
Moreover, instead of doing this through complex multi-capable software model, the university’s design utilizes existing software and presumes low bandwidth and technological savvy on the part of users.
Technology opens the potential for learning by getting inside demonstrations of best practices all over the world, getting inside peer critique actions, and getting inside theory and literature. What students have in their hands and learn to use is a portal for learning that blurs the line between research (discovery), learning (internalizing), and practice (creating change).
Because the connectedness is occurring within scholarship, what will evolve is a mode of global peer review enabled the way peer-reviewed journals once worked and the way Wikipedia now works. Workers at the community level are customarily supervised, not reviewed by peers. From such localized peer review three consequences result: first, in this roles shift, second, the consequence gathers informed help, and third it is collated and assembled as a reviewed body of knowledge for larger learning. The creation of global learning engagement has added to what was previously a pyramidal process of downward critique into an up-and-down sharing to determine global standards.