The university of tomorrow could be in a virtual world.
Don Sambandaraksa
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| Andrew Lim, Sun’s APAC director for government, education and healthcare, warns that universities not yet on Education 2.0 will miss out when Education 3.0 hits. |
We are approaching a tipping point in education, and universities who are not today on Education 2.0 might be lose out entirely when Education 3.0 hits our shores, according to Sun Microsystems who is leading and powering much of the innovation behind this third wave.
Andrew Lim, Sun Microsystems' Asia-Pacific director for government, education and healthcare, said that university students today were born in the eighties and live and breathe technology. This new generation is all about speed, multitasking and multimedia. They are used to Web 2.0 which is getting information from the Net and about contributing information to the Net.
Education 1.0 is what most of us grew up with. To have knowledge, you have to go to university and listen to a professor, borrow books from the library. The only way to gain knowledge is to be a passive absorber of knowledge.
Education 2.0 is about using Web 2.0; about sharing, collaboration, online courses and services. It is about mobility, open content, open technology and, of course, open source.
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| 20 is Sun’s newest office ‘building’ built in a secure virtual world called Wonderland. |
Many companies are still trying to adjust to this new world order, while Sun has embraced it in a totally open solution stack from chip, operating system, middleware and database.
"This is where we are right now. The role of the professor is to guide, and he is not the single source of knowledge. We are dealing with open technology, open participation and open collaboration among universities. Students are no longer passive, but active," he said.
Education 3.0 is a concept first put forward by Derek K. Keats and J. Philip Schmidt of the University of Western Cape, South Africa. In Education 3.0, the professor is no longer a source of knowledge, but a guide. Accreditation comes from a global basis. It is no longer about a university controlling materials that are scarce, but about the students themselves learning and contributing to knowledge.
Lim said that while that was the general idea, the matter of accreditation and certification had yet to be finalised, yet more and more people were now warming to the concept which may transform education as we know it quickly.
In both Education 2.0 and 3.0, Lim says that the repository of information and sharing is important and it is in this area that Sun is working on today in terms of software architecture, identity management and knowledge repository management.
"The message to our (education) partners in Thailand is that education is approaching a tipping point. You have to catch up. If the tipping point happens and you are not there, it is dangerous.
"Education has not changed for hundreds of years. You go to a place where the professor is famous and go to a library where you cannot afford to buy books. But now you have YouTube and all kinds of Web 2.0 technologies. Do you have to go to a campus to gain knowledge? No," he said.
Today there are 1.5 billion people online. Sun invests $2 billion a year in research and development. The idea is that the more devices connect to the network, the more activity there is at the back end. Sun is primarily a data centre company and by creating more activity on the Internet, it gets to sell more back end infrastructure to serve the Internet.
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| The Sun Porta Person allows avatars in MPK20 to interact with real-world people on different campuses. |
"The main difference is that we are open source. From our development platform to database, even our microprocessor is open source. We innovate, share, build the community and then provide the infrastructure behind it with key partners," he said.
The government, education and healthcare market in Apac (which for Sun Microsystems means Korea, Japan and Asia South but not China or India) is $7 billion. More importantly, everything done by government has influence for the rest of the industry though setting standards and for the manpower development of the country.
Education has been important for Sun for a long time and today it sponsors both professors and students around the world, cooperates on research and lately has developed Curriki, an open source curriculum for primary and secondary education, working with ministries of education around the world.
Many universities today have a campus built on the Second Life online platform. Sun has gone one better and built their own platform from the ground up and in Sun tradition, it is an open source project.
Darkstar is the name of the engine used to build massively scalable online virtual worlds. Wonderland is one virtual world built on the Darkstar engine. MPK 20 is Sun Microsystems' latest office building in Wonderland. Its Menlo Park campus has 19 buildings, MPK1 through MPK19. Rather than build another building in the real world, the decision was made to build MPK20 in Wonderland and give new employees an office there.
Lim said that Darkstar allows the federation of multiple virtual worlds into one. This would allow different university campuses to collaborate. It also is built around enterprise-class identity management, firewalls and security that is lacking in Second Life-based campuses.
Wonderland is designed for collaboration and features walls where real-world projects can be worked on together, real-world robots that can be controlled by in-world avatars to interact with real people on campus and an immersive sound system that encourages mingling and socialisation or team-building.
Three years ago Sun launched Project Jedi (Java Education and Development Initiative) with the University of the Philippines to teach Java development and so far 133,788 students have gone through the project. Project Jedi will be launched in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia in 2009.
Governments around the region are facing problems on opening up legacy systems, breaking down silos and enabling cross-agency collaboration and ensuring that government information generated today can be archived and accessed 100 years in the future. At the same time they face challenges on security and providing cost-effective citizen services.
Lim said that Korea and Japan were ahead of the game and were looking at ubiquitous government.
Single access to healthcare records nationwide is also high on the agenda and Sun is working with BT in the UK on a project for the UK's National Health Service.
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