Developments in technology may be the answer to the deficiency in higher education.
John Brown, former chief scientist of the Xerox Corporation and current visiting scholar at the University of Southern California, explored the impact of technology on education in his speech "The Social Life of Learning in the Net Age" at the Nasher Museum of Art Thursday night.
"Over 30 million people in the world are qualified to enter a university but have no available place to go," Brown said.
He noted that to meet this staggering global demand, a major university must be created every week.
"Because we can't afford to do that, we have to rethink how and where we learn, and how a culture of sharing and participation might help," Brown added.
The right combination of technology and learning may tackle the problem of informational delivery to the 30 million people who are unable to attend school, he said.
Brown listed several transformative initiatives that connect technology with learning more effectively on a global scale.
"The Open Education Resource movement started in 2001 when [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] started offering free access to primary course materials for everyone around the world through the Internet," Brown said.
Many universities around the world have now adopted the open-education ideal, with a large number of universities in the People's Republic of China, he said.
"Universities are thinking about what they're especially good at and putting those courses online," Brown said.
Technology has also been instrumental in the transmission of scientific knowledge, he said, citing the Australian-owned Faulkes Telescope that allows real-time images to be accessed from any school in Australia.
Brown added that the field of humanities have also benefited from highly specialized scholarly websites.
"The University of Virginia's 'Valley of the Shadow' [website] allows students to dive into a great amount of Civil War material right online," he said.
Brown noted another contribution of technology to learning comes from the open-source movement, a practice that encourages public contribution to software development.
Open-source communities like Linux-a computer operating system that allows individual users to modify the program code written by other users-encourages practical code writing that can be easily understood by others, Brown said.
"I'm going to argue that thousands if not hundreds of thousand of kids today learn about the practices of [computer] programming by joining an open-source community," he said. "You have to understand the sensibilities of this virtual community, which is a whole new type of learning platform."
Tying the transformative initiatives together, Brown noted a creation of new kinds of "ecosystems of intertwining knowledge."
"From the networks of imagination emerge a new educational milieu that transcends universities," he said.
The combination of technology and education exemplifies the social view of learning, which focuses on participation, instead of the traditional Cartesian view of learning that treats knowledge as a substance transmitted from teacher to student, Brown said.
"We come to understand something through conversation and our interaction with the world," Brown added, citing that studying in groups is often more effective than learning straight from the textbook.
Brown's speech opened Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface conference-the first international conference organized by Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory.
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