Intervention presented on the occasion of Infopoverty World Conference 2012, Who drives the Digital Revolution.]

"New Technologies for Distance Teaching University: A Strategy for development" (English version)

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Background

The convergence of telecommunications and computer science, the realisation of computer-based networks and the integration of languages, by overcoming space and time constraints, gave rise to the globalisation process and to the development of the knowledge society. We are facing a true revolution that is based on the multiplication of knowledge and its corresponding applications, but also on the knowledge codification, memorisation and knowledge transfer. Thanks to the Internet, in theory, all people can become the beneficiaries, but also the distributors of knowledge, both on individual and on a collective basis. Technological progress enable us to dialogue with the screen, to transfer our needs and wishes to it.

In the Internet, millions of people speak to one another according to multicultural perspectives, they spread their needs, wishes as well as products linked to their own creativity, they buy products, receive information, follow training courses, socialise with groups of different cultures etc. New ways for expressing feelings, love and friendship arise.

The Internet connects in an interactive way, in synchronic and diachronic way, users of different countries of the world and it brings about significant changes as it regards the de-materialisation of the worlds of production and knowledge: a dematerialisation resulting from the shift from a universe of practical experience to a universe of symbolic abstractions. For the first time in world history, in a concrete way and without letting the wings of imagination fly, mind and body break free from constraints joined in space and time.

We live in an interconnected, globalised world that has a deep impact on our way of being, but also on our political, economic world, on our balances, our certainties that are no longer linked to only one country, one nation. Lately we have witnessed the first revolutions of the world that had as their main diffusion tools: the Internet, television, mobile phones. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, together with satellite television networks such as Al-Jazeera, new media enabling to share and produce contents, are the arenas of freedom where the young people of the Arab World, recently expressed their dissent. The power of these tools was unsuspected and, in a short time, they involved millions of people who, all together, succeeded in destroying political systems that, up to that time, never showed their weaknesses before.

These are the new arenas of globalised society. This is unprecedented. Societies are moving along two parallel paths: the one of the old political models that keep on developing national laws and the one of interconnected man who interacts, often alone, with other foreign contexts without possessing the appropriate tools enabling him to become aware of this situation. In my opinion, today public powers should be conscious of the importance of creating contents to be posted in the Internet. The development of hardware was highly welcome and, at present, we can use technologies that easily connect us with the entire world: PCs, mobile phones, smartphones and tablets such as iPads. However, we cannot say that the same financial support is provided for the production of Internet educational and training contents which can offer the cultural tools to move in the world without boundaries, to create a new system of shared values according to which the respect for differences is at the basis of any form of human interaction.

This new social background arises several questions on the political and cultural choices that governments, businesses, educational and training systems and every single user has to make.