The Big Picture: A Global Learning Community

Wireless two-way, high bandwidth Internet multimedia communications via low-orbiting satellites combined with increasingly affordable laptop computers promise to bring online access to billions within the next decade.

Self-published Internet multimedia instruction via the rapidly evolving WWWeb environment creates the potential for everyone to become both learner and teacher. Entrepreneurial teaching for a world market has the potential for creating a new information economy centered around learning.

Bill Gates in his book The Road Ahead suggests the future big industries will be:
1. Education,
2. Social Services and
3. Entertainment.
Join them together and you get "Fun Social Learning; a merging of school and community networking in a K-100 familial learning context." Training how to engage in purposeful school and community networking is inherently a social process, a cultural communications adaptation.

The emerging demand for online instruction on Community Networking, Net-preneurship, and Electronic Democracy suggests that teaching online facilitation/mentoring skills might be the logical next step beyond global publishing.

The growing synergies of school and community networking will evolve through courses and methodologies that empower people to create and market their own courses. The potential for transnational action groups and similar global democratic collaborative activities will become increasingly apparent.

Take a look at some of the sites listed below.

- The TOURBUS Internet tutorials

- Netizens