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I’M WRITING this on the train to
Cambridge, on my way to a symposium on “The Virtual University”. This is causing
me cognitive dissonance. As my mother said five years ago when I told her I was
travelling to an Internet conference in Paris: “But . . . why?”

Why did I spend a lot of 1999 on trains and planes all over Europe going to
face-to-face meetings to advise the European Commission about the communications
revolution? Is there something uniquely valuable about face-to-face interaction
for learning or business? I don’t think so.

The main reason why virtual meetings—and virtual
universities—don’t happen is that we don’t yet have the right software.
The virtual university will be a pipe dream until we have computer programs that
can build radically new learning environments.

Most Western universities have a researcher or two trying to write this
software. I recently waded through reams of reports to review what’s new in the
field for the Joint Information Systems Committee, the body that runs Britain’s
academic Internet. One project based at the University of Wales, Bangor, caught
my attention. It’s called Colloquia, and its authors make a striking
assertion.

Students aren’t customers, they say. Students are workers. Instead of
passively receiving information, what students need are the tools to construct
an education for themselves. Colloquia is developing “peer-to-peer” technology.
All copies of the program are equal: they don’t need a central server computer
to store information—which means they don’t need a university to house the
server.

Almost all virtual learning software offers “virtual seminars” in the form of
e-mail discussion lists or bulletin boards. But most systems are designed by
software managers for sale to university managers, so they put the power to
create such seminars in the hands of . . . managers.

This is the wrong approach, says Colloquia. Any worker should be able to
discuss anything, so any student should be able to create a seminar. If they
want to lock out the lecturer, so what? Students can already create e-mail lists
to discuss their teachers behind their backs—they’ve done it to me. When
we have hardware that can cope with it, online seminars will provide sound and
images too. Eventually, virtual-reality gatherings will involve all the
behaviours you see at conferences, from huddles around the most interesting
person to eavesdropping.

That’s the idea of Nottingham University’s MASSIVE project (Model,
Architecture and System for Spatial Interaction in Virtual Environments). It’ll
be a while before this runs well on computers that students can afford. But we
can build software now to handle “objects” that are computer representations of
almost any resource for education that you can think of. These will drop right
in once there is a standard way to “wrap” them. The Institute of Electrical and
Electronic Engineers is developing standards.

The next generation may not be students as we know them. “Lifelong learning”
is a popular buzzword, but its practice is largely restricted to commercial
training and, in Britain, the Open University—wonderful but still largely
dependent on the postal system. The virtual university will open up part-time,
real-time education to people with jobs and families.

In the future, universities will be cultures, not places. In the view of
Colloquia’s Oleg Liber, universities have two main functions: “They are places
where you go to meet people who are like you, and they validate lecturers.” The
nature of that validation is surely going to change. But what will replace this
late-medieval system? The answer is closely tied to another question: who’s
going to pay for producing educational resources?

The most impassioned discussion at the Cambridge symposium was about
lecturers’ rights over the material they produce. If everything is available
online, students-as-workers will buy their materials wherever they want, perhaps
paying small sums directly to authors. So what will become of today’s practice
whereby publishers demand academics hand over rights to their research papers
and books? And what of some universities’ practice of claiming outright
ownership of educational material, such as course notes, if they are delivered
mostly to students enrolled at other universities or at no university at
all?

I had another moment of dissonance when an energetic discussion broke out
about authors’ “moral rights”. These include your rights to be identified as
author, and to object if someone makes damaging changes to your work. A couple
of years ago they were considered mind-bogglingly obscure, but now academics and
other authors find an urgent need to discuss, for example, whether you can
insist that your lectures are delivered in their entirety and not snipped up
into out-of-context sound bites.

For many virtual learning sceptics, the biggest question is not the fate of
the content, but its delivery. Won’t students lose out on the essentials of
meeting like minds, or of being inspired by the physical presence of a lecturer?
Clearly, an online course in dance or sculpture is unlikely to succeed.
Chemistry and anatomy students may benefit from fleshing out computer models
with actual stinks, but why not save all this for a three-week stint each year?
After all, which senses are essential? Virtual learning environments will offer
brilliant sights and sounds, but in most cultures touching and tasting your
teachers is positively discouraged.

If virtual learning becomes the norm, future historians will comb libraries
for information on how people used to learn. They will sniff the pages of books,
and wonder how it was that so many got so attached to the odours of heavy diesel
oil or mushrooms. They will marvel that the essential rites of passage of the
bar and the bed were once tied to education.

Perhaps this kind of historical inquiry will gain popularity.
Eighteen-year-olds at virtual universities will need a new excuse for moving out
of home to escape parental restraints. And parents may develop new enthusiasm
for their offspring to become archaeologists—for the same reason.