This book is not only the arrival point of the long scientific research activity realised by Maria Amata Garito, but it identifies a new way to evolve the traditional universities in order to link them to the real needs of our globalised and interconnected society.The Internet with its lights and shadows, is the largest public space that the world has never had. It connects the human thought at a global level that requires a new model of education, and, thus, a new model of university.
From the historical analysis of the university models from the Middle Ages to the Present it was evidenced as the University of the XXI Century is at a crossroads between the atrophy and the renaissance, the stagnation and the renewal. Almost all over the world today it is debating the fact that the traditional university is no longer able to meet the needs of a globalised and interconnected society. There is a generational clash of great importance. The digital natives, the new generation of students, calls into question the model of the traditional university. The XXI Century requires a reinvention of the University, its transformation is no longer a choice but a urgent necessity.
The creation of a global network for higher education where teachers and students from different parts of the world participate in the collaborative construction of the knowledge is no longer a utopia. This approach can help the university to create a new form of vitality and to become the leaders of the global economy.
Furthermore, two new university models (the NETTUNO Consortium model and the International Telematic University UNINETTUNO one) were described in the book.
Both models were able to anticipate the future, creating a technological and intelligence network with no more limits of space, time, and place, that develop together the knowledge. A new university model is the departure point to build the future. The future is not a gift, it is a conquest that requires struggle and sacrifice of every generation in order to meet the needs of a new era. This fact, never as in this moment, unites the peoples of the North and South of the world in order to face a new challenge: to meet the needs of a globalised and interconnected world.
From the preface by Paolo Prodi“One of the most widespread fraught with danger mistakes committed in the process of discussing the university “reform” is to oppose to an old and stale traditional university a university of the future based on the new technologies without time and space limits. In my opinion, the utility of this book written by a professor like Maria Amata Garito, who tried difficulties of this passage in years of practical and experimental work, is needed, above all, to combat this misunderstanding: the new university may not come into being in a vacuum but has to develop using the millenarian tradition in the new communication network of knowledge”.