Dear Friends: Dear Friends:
Greetings and best wishes for the 4th FOCAS seminar on "Futures of Internet and the Green World." In looking through the program, I am reminded of the many important topics that form the substance of advanced societies which, unless handled with care and understanding, can become major problems for future generations. I am also reminded of how important it is to have the opportunity to gain the cooperation of governmental leaders and other decision makers for fulfilling the ultimate purpose of making the future world a worthwhile place for our descendants. This need for cooperation often seems very difficult to obtain.
Perhaps one of the best ways to ensure the future cooperation of leaders is to train them through the facilities of the Network University. They should be persons of high ethical character who anticipate a life in public service and who would be trained at an advanced level in such subjects as sustainability, economics, the environment, population growth, and so forth. This is an ideal picture, but it is necessary for progress to have an idealistic as well as a realistic view of future possibilities.
I wish you very well in your efforts.
Sincerely,
Jerome Karle
Dear Kaoru,
I was delighted to hear from you and to note that the 4th FOCAS Seminar is going ahead as planned. I understand the restraints on you which have limited your capacity to invite international resource persons. I would have loved to participate.
Like last year, the theme of the seminar is most relevant to the programme I am directing at UNESCO: Learning Without Frontiers. The programme is motivated by the rapid change the world is facing and the fact that existing learning systems are inadequately equipped to respond to this new challenge, in addition to their incapacity to resolve the problems of the past. Technologies like those of networking are of great importance in that context as they allow "open learning communities" to emerge that are flexible and demand oriented, permitting learners of any age to learn independent of where they are, at what moment they are available and in what circumstances they live. Last year's seminar was able to bring out the power of some of those technologies. I trust that this year will be even better. Developments are fast.
It was a pleasure for me to visit the Network University of the Green World homepage and I wish to congratulate you with the quality of both its content and structure.
Finally, I should like to greet the participants and resource persons (some of whom I met last year) of the 4th FOCAS Seminar and wish them success in their deliberations. We shall be interested in receiving any documentation that may result from the meeting.
Wishing you also personally success,
sincerely,
Jan Visser
Learning Without Frontiers Coordinator
UNESCO, Paris, France