Any serious consideration given to the future of education and training in the new cyberculture must be preceded by a careful analysis of the profound changes occurring in the way we learn and acquire knowledge. In this regard, we must first acknowledge the speed at which knowledge and know-how appears and is being updated. For the first time in the history of humanity most of the skills a person acquires at the beginning of his career will be obsolete at the end of his professional life. The second observation, which is related to the first, concerns the change in the way we work, where the amount of time devoted to the transfer of knowledge is constantly increasing. Work is more and more synonymous with learning, transferring know-how and producing knowledge. Third observation: cyberspace supports intellectual technologies which amplify, materialize, and transform a number of human cognitive functions: memory (data bases, hyperdocuments, digital files of all kinds), imagination (simulations), perception (digital sensors, telepresence, virtual reality), and thinking (artificial intelligence, modeling of complex phenomena).
Such intellectual technologies promote:

Due to the fact that these intellectual technologies - and particularly dynamic memory - have been materialized in digital documents or softwares that can be consulted by network (or easily reproduced and transferred), they can be shared with a large number of people. Thus, these intellectual technologies augment the potential collective intelligence of human groups.

The knowledge-flow, the work-transaction of knowledge, the new technologies of collective and individual intelligence are all dramatically altering our approach to education and training. What must be learned can no longer be planned and precisely defined in advance. Career paths and profiles are all different and are more and more difficult to channel into programs or courses that are valid for everyone. We must build new models that more accurately portray this new space of knowledge. The traditional representation of the knowledge space is linear (parallel step-ladders or pyramids structured into levels). These representation are geared by the concept of prerequisite and converge toward "higher" education. This scheme must be gradually replaced by a representation of open, emerging spaces of knowledge that are continuous, evolving, non-linear, and are reorganising according to specific objectives or contexts. More so, in those dynamic knowledge spaces, each individual enjoys a distinct, evolving position.

Two major reforms of education and training systems are thus necessary.

First, the wider use of open and distance learning (ODL) - both in spirit and practice - in daily normal education. Of course, ODL exploits various remote teaching techniques, including hypermedia, interactive communication networks, and all the intellectual technologies available in cyberculture. However, what is essential is not the technique but a new pedagogical style: one that promotes both personalized learning and cooperative learning using networks. In this context, the teacher has to inspire the exchange of knowledge and collective intelligence between his students rather than dispensing information unidirectionaly.

The second reform has to do with the recognition of acquired knowledge. If people learn from their social and professional experiences, if schools and universities are gradually losing their monopoly in the creation and transmission of knowledge, then public educational systems can at least assume a new mantle of responsibility. First by helping individuals orienting themselves in this new realm of knowledge. Second by recognizing all the skills and knowledge they have acquired including their non-academic know-how. The new tools available in cyberspace enable the prospective of a vast array of automated tests that could be accessed at any time. These tools can also support skill supply and demand transaction networks. By organizing the communication between employers, individuals, and learning resources of all kinds, universities of the future will make a valuable contribution to the development of a new economy of knowledge.

Articulating many points of view without a god’'s point of view

In one of my courses at the University of Paris-VIII, entitled "digital technologies and cultural evolutions", I ask each of my students to make a ten-minute presentation. The day before their presentation, each student is expected to give me a two-page summary with bibliography so that it can be photocopied and distributed to other students who want to familiarize themselves with the subject.
Last year, one student handed me his two-page summary and said somewhat mysteriously: "Here, it's a virtual presentation!" As I studied the summary, nothing suggested anything out of the ordinary: a bold-lettered heading, sub-titles, underlined words in a rather well-written text, and a bibliography. Amused by my skepticism, my student lead me and a few curious students into a computer room where we crowded around a monitor. I soon discovered that the two-page summary I had just perused was actually a printed version of two web pages.
Instead of an isolated text fixed on a cellulose support; instead of a well-defined territory belonging to the author delineated by a beginning, end, and margins that form its boundaries, I was staring at an open, dynamic document, that was ubiquitous and provided links to a seemingly endless number of documents. The same text had assumed an entirely different character. One can speak of pages when referring to both types of documents, but the first is a "pagus" (from Latin, meaning a peasant’s field), a delimited portion of territory, defining ownership, and replete with well-entrenched signs; the second is a flowing entity, subject only to the constraints of the network's throughput. Even though the first page might refer the reader to other articles or books, it is physically limited. The second page (the web page), however, connects us technically and immediately with documents from anywhere in the world, and these pages provide links to still further pages, to other little drops of the same global ocean of fluctuating signs.

A web page is but a single component, a minute portion of an unfathomable body of documentation that makes up the World Wide Web. But, via the links it provides throughout the entire network, through the cross-roads and by-roads that it proposes, the Web page also constitutes a selection, a structural agent, and a filter of the Web’s body of work. Every component of this unconfinable network is at the same time a bundle of information and a navigational instrument; it is both a component part and an original point of view on the whole. On one side, the web page is simple drop in a steady flow of data, on the other side it provides a unique filter in this ocean of information.

On the Web, every thing is on the same level. Yet this is not to say that there are no distinctions. There is no absolute hierarchy but each site enables selection, redirection and establishes a partial hierarchy. Far from being an amorphous mass, the Web articulates many points of view, operating obliquely, spreading like a rhizome, without a central dominant perspective or god’s eye view. No one will dispute this may be a source of confusion. New indexing and research tools must be invented, as evidenced by the lenghtly works currently being done on the dynamic mapping of data spaces, on the intelligent "agents" or on the cooperative filtering of information. It is nevertheless highly probable that, regardless of future advances in navigational techniques, cyberspace will continue to proliferate and remain largely open, radically heterogeneous and immeasurable.