ABSTRACT
Conventional universities bring students, faculty, library and researchers together in buildings by means of transport systems. Virtual universities bring them together by means of computers and telecommunications. These are also the technologies that enable globalisation. Where the critical components of a conventional university exist as atoms, in a virtual university they exist as bits of information. The Internet made first generation virtual universities possible, with the World Wide Web providing the knowledge base that traditionally came with a university library and email accelerating what open universities already did. However, the Internet is in its infancy. This chapter considers the implications for virtual universities as Internet bandwidth and computer processing capability grow, as they most assuredly will. It explores the impact on the university paradigm of speech recognition, multilingual systems, wearable computing, wireless Internet, artificial intelligence, avatars, virtual reality and HyperReality. It describes the technological infrastructure in which universities will be enmeshed, in the not so distant
future. Will they still be struggling to catch up and adapt to technological change after it becomes inevitable, as happened with the introduction of the Internet, or will they take a lead in designing and developing the technologies in which knowledge will be embedded and in exemplifying how IT can be used in an information society? To what extent will universities shape information technology, and to what extent will they be shaped by it?
