SUNDAY 9 JULY, 2017 – UWI TODAY
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4. Universities will have to align more strongly with
industry and commerce as well as governments to build
mutually beneficial partnerships. These alignments
and partnerships, captured in the Triple Helix for
sustainable development, would engage what we
call the innovation spectrum, typified on one end by
joint R&D programmes for improving product and
process and, on the other, by commercialization of new
research ideas. Students would naturally be involved
in this process.
5. Operate in the global space by partnering with
universities worldwide.The gap establishing the “best”
universities would have widened. As one Australian
V-C noted, “There will be 15-20 independent, global
brands … the rest will be playing for the silver medal.”
Experts suggest that the select group will include the
usual suspects – the Ivy Leagues of the world.
The UWI’s Strategic Plan has identified the potential
realities and has set its sight on significant growth, with
the objective of “Revitalising Caribbean Development.”
Its implementation plan includes a range of initiatives:
joint projects with industry – we will soon sign an MOU
to provide for a “hack space” of sorts in the Faculty of
Engineering, creation of posts of Professors in Practice for
placement of industry captains in the university system,
online delivery to be significantly expanded, and plans for
the expansion of our Centre of Export Entrepreneurship
and Innovation to leverage all of UWI capability to provide
a conduit for moving student, staff and stakeholder ideas
to reality.
Close your eyes and try to imagine 2020, 2030, 2040,
2050. It can be an exciting vision if you choose to be part
of creating it. I encourage everyone to try this exercise. It
was, for me, a bit more difficult than I first thought it would
be. But it helps, because when you visualize the future, it
allows you to set your strategy to enable our young ones
to better prepare for it.
PROFESSOR BRIAN COPELAND
Campus Principal
EDITORIAL TEAM
CAMPUS PRINCIPAL
Professor Brian Copeland
DIRECTOR OF MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS
Dr Dawn-Marie De Four-Gill
EDITOR
Vaneisa Baksh • email:
CONTACT US
The UWI Marketing and Communications Office
Tel: (868) 662-2002, exts. 82013 / 83997 or email:
Even now, with the democratization of knowledge
consequent to the proliferation of online courses, as one
AustralianUniversity Vice-Chancellor stated in the Ernst
& Young 2012 report, “Our major competitor in ten
years’ time will be Google…if we’re still alive!”
However, the use of these bio implants would
automate education at the knowledge transfer level.
My colleagues in the education sector should take
serious note of this possibility. I am secretly hoping
that our young, keen computer scientists at UWI might
also feature prominently in the global technological
landscape based on work I have seen. For instance, they
have just produced a suite of apps called AgriNeTT
to help farmers manage their finances, monitor crop
production, view soil and land information, check the
suitability of land for planting specific crops and to
monitor the daily prices of crops.
Automated learning would revolutionize distance
learning so that it would not have the high dropout rates
as at present. By and large, most of the current models
do not fully accommodate students as social beings.
Furthermore, in that world where knowledge transfer
would supposedly be more accessible and effective,
existing universities would have to re-engineer their
processes and policies to do the following:
1. Provide a focal point for certification and recognition
of academic achievement, regardless of how
attained.The emphasis will be on the ability to apply
knowledge – a competency/skills-based paradigm
as opposed to a credit-based paradigm.
2. Focus much more on being creators of new
knowledge. Teaching and research also would have
to encourage more critical thinking among our
students
3. Provide a richer student experience. As said by Evans
Cameron, CTO for Education at Microsoft in 2012,
“If there’s anything that will be significantly different
25 years from today, it’s that people won’t go to
school for knowledge. They will go to school for an
experience that they couldn’t otherwise have gotten
online.” That experience will include “— not just
facts and figures, but also analysis, interpretation,
and curation of knowledge” (Ernst & Young 2012
Report).
I was recently invited to speak
at the Rotary Club San Fernando
South on the topic “The future
of UWI in the Cyberspace of
2050.” Trying to imagine a future
over thirty years away is always
extremely risky and, some would
say, close to impossible.
If it is one thing this past fifty
years has taught us, is that the
speed with which things change
and are replaced is far more rapid than anything the world
has known before. It means there is no way anyone can
realistically paint a portrait of 2030, far less 2050.
What we do know is that the citizen of tomorrow has
to be flexible and savvy to be able to survive.
The vision that the UWI team and I now share is that
survival is by far the most important objective for any
education system. We believe that our citizens must be
educated and trained to meet and beat every challenge that
comes their way.
But for us to get to that level of self-determination, we
need to have a vision.
I took the risk of giving a forecast of the technologies
available in 2050 based largely on some of today’s emerging
technologies. One thing we can say for sure is that if we
maintain the current trajectory, and if the world survives
to2050, the technology of that time will be unimaginably
more advanced.
I will comment on just two aspects but we know these
advances will bring new social challenges. Time and space
do not permit me to delve too deeply on this aspect.
Transportation will be superfast, spanning hitherto
inaccessible physical spaces, from the deep ocean to
immediate space. There may be wars fought over extra-
planetary real estate. Star Trek-inspired teleportation
technology (“beamme up Scotty”) may well be at the point
of commercial deployment. This technology is based on
local disassembly and precise remote reassembly at the
molecular level. It is not as farfetched as one might think, as
ongoing experiments have opened doors to its possibility. If
this technology comes to be, it would certainly disrupt the
paradigmof physical transportation. It could revolutionize
medical treatment and, as for any powerful technology,
could make crime fighting significantly more challenging.
If that is not thought-provoking enough, if the
technology is successfully applied to the teleportation of
live humans, religions everywhere may all be driven to a
state of disarray. How does one “beam” the essence of life?
Look at communications. In 2050 we should
be able to simultaneously transmit to all five senses.
Currently we communicate sound and sight. Over the
past 10 years haptic technology, or tactile feedback, has
allowed us to communicate touch. Haptics feedback has
already successfully been used in remote surgery. I am
pretty convinced that, based on what has already been
experimented with or gone through preliminary field
tests, by 2050 we would be able to communicate using
smell and taste, and would have perfected touch or tactile
transmission, pushing virtual interaction to its limit
without the kludgy tools used today in virtual reality tools
and games. Experimentation into the transmission of
emotion has already begun at the MIT Media Labs. Movie
experiences would be far different from what it is now.
Communication would be further enhanced by
nanotechnology implants that tie into the human brain.
If this comes to be, then it should also be possible to
programme, de-programme and re-programme knowledge
and skill into an individual – or transfer knowledge,
skill and even personalities to computers and machines
(androids and robots).
FROM THE PRINCIPAL
UWI in the Cyberspace of 2050
“I took the risk of giving a forecast of the technologies available in 2050 based
largely on some of today’s emerging technologies. One thing we can say for sure
is that if we maintain the current trajectory, and if the world survives to 2050,
the technology of that time will be unimaginably more advanced.”
