The HyperClass: Education in a braodband internet environment.

The eighties saw the advent of the PC in education, the nineties saw the coming of narrow band internet to education, the first decade of the new millennium seems set to see the spread of broadband internet in education. What will it mean for education when students and teachers can access Pentium 4 computers with 214 meg bandwidth from wherever they are? John Tiffin with Lalita Rajasingham of Victoria University and Nobuyoshi Terashima of Waseda University, in collaboration with colleagues around the world, have been studying this question over the last decade. In particular they have been looking at the application on the Internet of a technology called HyperReality (see Tiffin and Terashima (eds) 'HyperReality: Paradigm for the Third Millennium' London and New York, Routledge) and in the USA Tele-Immersion. The idea of the technology is that it provides a space where physical reality an virtual reality and human intelligence and artificial intelligence can inter-act in a manner that becomes increasingly seamless. ne space could be a class - hence the idea of a HyperClass. The paper looks at the experimental work already carried out between Japan and New Zealand to develop such a system. It addresses the implications for education of real students, teachers and objects freely interacting with virtual students, teachers and objects and with artificial intelligence in a class. Finally it draws on the work of Tiffin and Rajasingham in designing a global virtual university (Tiffin and Rajasingham - (MS)) to look at the possibilities for developing HyperUniversities, HyperColleges and HyperSchools which would allow the intersection of global and local dimensions in education.