Content Sharing between NETTUNO and the ltalian and Mediterranean Universities

The challenges that educational institutions, and universities in particular, must face are linked to the fact that, nowadays school or university classrooms are no longer the only places where it is possible to learn. Anybody in any piace, if he has the proper technological equipment and materials, can bui Id by himself a space where he can set up his own learning and self-learning process. Museums, cultura! centres, cyber cafés, internet cafés, etc. are the new places where knowledge is distributed in the city, that is at locai level, but they are also nodes for accessing a global, that is, world wide knowledge. There is a continuous and progressive process of coding, memorisation and transfer of knowledge and functions to automatic and computer structures, that extend and multiply the possibilities to gain information and knowledge and to establish interactions and exchanges among subjects of different cultura! levels, coming from the educational environments of different countries of the world. This process highlights the changes that are taking piace in the idea of education and training itself and the limits of the traditional university teaching systems worldwide. In this new context, as it regards education and training, it is nowadays necessary to establish new systems, new public politics, and also new organisational models for universities at a locai, national and international level. The university of the 21 st century should be capable of integrating within its curricula knowledgèflinked to the cultures of different countries; it should be capable of developing specific professional skills but also criticai and creative abilities; it should supply the tools needed to solve complex problems that are connected with a global economy; it should develop the knowledge of languages linked to the new technologies. The university should be capable of educating a person that is able to combine professional skills and criticai abilities so as to be able to live within complexity; he should be ab le to 'learn how to learn' by an intelligent use of the new cognitive technologies; to develop the abilities to select, master, and assimilate information that is available on the Internet; to transform them into knowledge and use them in rapid and effective way. Therefore the problem, currently shared by all universities worldwide, is no longer whether or not education reproduces social inequalities; today the problem is how to cope with the new changes brought about by the knowledge society and how to create, within a context of a global economy, systems that develop integrated teaching and learning processes, because they use different languages for communicating knowledge, and open, because they have no borders or limits of space and time. These university systems need to be able to develop an educational and training space 'intra muros' and 'extra muros' so as to offer students the possibility of attending university both face to face and at a distance.