By Carl Vilbrandt, Associate Professor of Computer Art Lab
The new Information Technology (IT) revolution such as the InTernet is creating great social and political changes globally. The power of many IT connected people to globally share the same information at a very low cost has broken the monopolistic control of information by the powerful institutions of the two dimensional ``paper" technology culture. The IT peer to peer broadcasting and sharing of global information is creating new multidimensional ``digital" media and supportive technologies.
In this new IT age of global competition, universities, governments, and other organizations must meet the new IT digital culture demands for openness, transparency and accountability in all transactions. Consequently, the University of Aizu was designed in location, size and structure to be a new digital university that is much different from the ``paper" based universities of the past.
The University of Aizu was created to support and promote IT and digital growth, ``knowledge for all humanity." However, no one said this would be an easy transition as all education up to this time has been based on the old ``paper" system of knowledge for the elite, the few.
With that in mind, The Web Working Group (WWG) of the Software Department of the University of Aizu has started development of an interactive and globally open educational web site for the Software Department. The web site because of cost, security risk, and the need for flexibility and openness will not be hosted only at the local area network of the University of Aizu, but on many different web and data base servers around the world. Any person at the University of Aizu is invited to join the open web based WWG. We plan to have web development projects and tools available soon at http://www.u-aizu.net.