Presented by James K. Chang
Founder and CEO, GKE (Global Knowledge Exchange)
President/CEO, COMWEB Technology Group
President of the Board, GKE Foundation

We live in a "Knowledge Era," a time when knowledge is power and learning rapidly and competently is a requirement for global success.  In response to this new imperative, educational institutions together with corporate training departments (including the many, new Corporate Universities) are hurrying to complete new technology-based classrooms and learning centers.  The best of these new facilities integrate a seemingly unlimited array of information sources.  They function as highly flexible, continuously updated and general-purpose multimedia learning environments.

This presentation is a progress report by Mr. Chang on his experiences during the past 10 years working with educational institutions of every type and size as well as leading corporations to re-engineer more than 3,000 learning sites in countries worldwide.  The emphasis here is on the human component, not the technological component – i.e. on the "human network," not the bandwidth.    Mr. Chang summarizes the design of a  21st Century Global Learning Infrastructure that can support the future of Higher Education Communities.

In a 21st century learning community, learners and sites from North America and Europe link routinely with sites in the Far East, the Middle East, and elsewhere, accessing anywhere, anytime as needed in a true, global learning environment that suits individual learning needs by utilizing hybrid digital-analog, synchronous-asynchronous approaches that combine internet/intranet with live video and data-conferencing tools. 

The end product is an infinitely scalable network of "e-Learning" available as a shared resource for worldwide education and corporate communities. No single education institution or corporation, no single country, could attempt such a project on its own.  But the right kind of global, technology-supported learning community is the powerful and essential force for "sustained knowledge development" in the 21st Century Knowledge Society's environments.