REINVENTING UNIVERSITY IN THE XXI CENTURY: NEW THEORIES AND NEW PSYCHO-PEDAGOGIC MODELS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING IN THE INTERNET

The existence of an Internet network, external to man, made up by interconnected digital memories, has completely changed the processes and mechanisms of production and transmission of knowledge, of research and learning; it has been more and more affecting knowledge communication languages. By now, the Internet has evolved into a global platform, ever richer of contents, and it is actually becoming the major infrastructure for knowledge exchange among people. Today every university should conform to the changes brought about by the Web, as it happened for many institutions that deal with contents production. All over the world a lot of discussions are going on about the role universities are playing and will be more than ever playing in the global network. The fast spreading of virtual campuses and the posting of videolessons in the Internet confirms that, in the next years, university students, teachers and lecturers will be ever more working within inter-university networks. The creation of a global network for higher education in which teachers and students from different places of the world participate in the collaborative construction of knowledge is not a utopia. By now a new “intra muros” and “extra muros” educational and training space is developing. New spaces of access to knowledge through the Internet can be everywhere: on PCs, on smartphones or on tablets and everybody can have access to knowledge with no limits of space and time. Creating an infrastructure for the higher education of the XXI Century involves adding to the university physical buildings a technological infrastructure: the Internet, which is an interactive and collective communication place, has its basis, as its peculiar richness, the direct involvement of its users in the creation as well as in the exploitation of contents. Of course, in case you want to use a technology as Internet, to activate teaching and learning processes, it is necessary to apply theoretical models useful to allow for constructing methodologies and languages suitable to teach and learn through the technologies. Research work on this issue is constantly evolving along with technological evolution. This presentation will illustrate the research activities whose results allowed to design and realize the Didactic Cyberspace of the International Telematic University UNINETTUNO, which is based on a systemic approach and on a new psycho-pedagogic model.