Towards Open Education Through Distributed and Networked Information Systems – An Experience-Based Approach

Abstract

To overcome overwhelming and global international struggles to secure limited resources such as oil and land, the potential role of open source education through networked and distributed information systems (DNIS) on the Web to create advanced IT experts as unlimited global resources is increasing rapidly. An experience-based summary of global open education is presented solely for promoting its practices. My life has been benefited from practicing open education, first at an elementary school and later at a graduate school. The openness has been local because of the lack of globalization mechanisms in education. It is fairly recent that we have effective global educations mechanisms for global interactivity and global two way communications such as the web and cyberspaces, distributed and networked information systems (DNIS) in particular. Compared to local open education, global open education removes the boundaries of ages, organizations, nations, sexes, and disciplines. Many unseen barriers exist to prevent global open education, mostly originating from survival intuitions and fights embodied in life itself. Since the barriers are rooted in the nature of life, it is hard to practice global openness in education. Hence it is important to cooperate for us to practice it to see real advances in our knowledge.