Just another morning in General Science 398: Human Evolution. With this difference: the student is in Germany, her professor is in Greece, and her 37 classmates live everywhere from Korea to Oslo. They're all taking courses sponsored by the University of Maryland's University College, which offers education for members of the U.S. military and their dependents. Distance learningusing computers and the Internetis the fastest-growing part of the college's program, and for good reason. Students are no longer limited to the range of courses provided by teachers in their immediate vicinity, while teachers can trawl for students on a global basis. In the house in western Crete where I'm writing this column (for those who follow this page closelythe snow on the mountains is gone since I was last here in May, but the oleanders are still in bloom), two professors sit before computers, teaching 11 courses to 220 students from all over the world.
There are two related lessons inherent in this scene. First, this is something brand-new: none of the immediacy of today's distance learning was possible 10 years ago. Globalization is not a phenomenon of the last decadetrade flows, human migration and the interpenetration of cultures are as old as human experience. At the same time, modern information and communications technology is genuinely transformative: it enables us to do things we have never been able to do before. Second, globalization is not simply a matter of commerce and economicsof Microsoft and Vivendi expanding into new territories, or the WTO and IMF setting the rules for global trade and capital flows. If our new world was run solely by the rules of the market and for the benefit of huge corporations, I would have a little more sympathy for those demonstrating in Seattle or Genoa. But in truth, and more interestingly, there's a private life of globalization, one that exists in the quotidian experiences of millions whose lives have been enriched by new technologies.
All of this has been on my mind this week, and not just from watching my friends teach students thousands of kilometers away. I flew to Crete from New York with my family. That last short sentence is so matter-of-fact, and describes such an everyday event, that I bet you hardly noticed it. Yet it describes a revolution. My father spent his whole life, save for a short period during World War II, within a few miles of the house in Liverpool where he was born. In the year he died, he still worshiped at the same church in which he had attended Sunday school 70 years before. He went to work in the same building for 40 years. My mother never flew. But her granddaughters — my children — have taken far more trips by plane than they have by train and bus combined; both of them had flown more than 50,000 km before they were two years old, which is when I stopped counting. A couple of years ago my sister, who lives in Scotland, announced the birth of her third child by an e-mail to the four siblings and cousins with whom she grew up. At the time, one lived in London, one in New York, and one in Wuhan, China; the fourth (who lives in Sydney) was somewhere on the Atlantic, during a circumnavigation of the world on his yacht. So when people say "globalization" as if it's a curse, I'm tempted to reply: "Hey, that's my life you're talking about."
It's plain beyond the need for argument that my family (and in all likelihood, dear reader, yours, too) is part of a privileged minority. The freedom to travel the world, or even just to surf the Net, is one that most people don't have and can't imagine. Joseph Nye of Harvard's Kennedy School has said that for most people in the world, life is still defined by family and village: in other words, by social networks that are both local and immediate. The digital divide within advanced industrial societies is as nothing compared to the one that separates those who live in the poor world from the rich.
In essence, we now face a choice. We can challenge and criticize the way that the modern form of globalization has endowed those who, in the larger scheme of things, already live privileged lives. Or we can seek to expand the use of new technologies to those who will most benefit from them. The latter is a lot harder than the former, but these days, the impossible has a way of making itself real. Until a few days ago, I wouldn't have believed that you could teach a university course to a global classroom from a village in Crete. Turns out, you can.