This week I fine-tuned my blog site to focus more on the global future of higher education. I have come to believe that international education is our best hope for achieving world peace, expanding media revolution literacy, solving debilitating global problems, achieving cross-cultural understanding, and producing informed and effective global-thinking leaders.
As a result, I spent several years studying globalization in general and have concluded there are two primary forces already at work reshaping the academy:
Disruption: The digital technology revolution has disrupted the academy with new social media platforms, interactive websites, and other Internet innovations. Technology changed how we teach and replaced traditional lectures with Internet searches and ever-expanding interactive media tools and resources. New on-line markets are also appearing. How institutions are marketed and communicated has changed as well. And the changes brought about by the Internet revolution have even enabled governments to change their national priorities and refocus their education roles.
Convergence: These forces are extremely powerful, but may be less apparent. They are accelerating globalization while at the same time stimulating the transformation of higher education. Beyond technology disruption, forces such as worldwide economy shifts, changing faculty and student migration patterns, intensified foreign competition for money and students, increased world travel in general, the impact of polarized political ideologies, new aggressive foreign policy initiatives, a growing nationalism in some part of the world, and aggressive nation-branding campaigns, all are converging to change and globalize virtually everything. And all of these forces also have strong implications for how international higher education will inevitably evolve.
In the coming weeks and months we will be exploring the implications of these forces for university advancement professionals, academic leaders at all levels, faculty, students, alumni, donors, business leaders, foundation heads, prospective students, politicians, and everyone affected by the consequences and opportunities of the globalization of higher education.
Coming in August: My new book The Transition Academy: Seizing Opportunity in the Age of Disruption addresses many of these issues. (CASE Books at http://www.case.org/books)
Larry D. Lauer 
Larry,
Great insights. The digital transformation has changed so much of our lives in such a short amount of time that it’s almost unfathomable.
This is certainly true, as you mentioned, in my area of media and journalism. The overlap between the two is clear. How people consume and share information is vastly different now than even a decade ago — before social media, smartphones and broadband Internet became common.
The changes have just began. There will be failures and successes, for every Google Glass there will be an iPhone.
How we share and receive information and how universities adapt will be key to their survival. Technology disrupts institutions, especially large ones, as we’ve seen with the newspaper industry.
Keep leading the way, Larry!
Aaron