Worldwide Interactions for Science, Education and Research in Universities (WISER-U)

We are living in a world with increasing challenges such as the lack of energy, the pollution of the environment, the crisis of economics and the global burst of epidemics. Creative ideas and responsible change makers are the keys to meet these serious challenges and continuously improve human society. However, the existing education and research environments are far from ideal incubators for great ideas or active change makers. Nowadays students and researchers have to spend too much time and energy to find good education resources, share ideas with proper people or do collaborative research effectively. This situation has to be changed to release the repressed creativity of human society.

We are dedicated to developing cutting-edge information technologies and real-life communities to improve the sharing of resource and creativity in education and research. Everyone in the world, no matter where they live and what languages they speak, should have access to the best education resources, find the right people to share ideas and collaborate on learning or research projects, and eventually to use their collective intelligence and actions to solve the increasing challenges the world faces.

Non-profit, Open-source and Collaborative.

First, we are going to establish an open integrated web 2.0-3.0 platform for students and researchers to store, search and share their resources and ideas. By combining the up-to-date open-source software with de novo designed web-tools and interfaces, this platform designed by students for students will offer convenient and powerful tools by which people will find unprecedented dimensions and potentials to learn, search, create, communicate and collaborate with each other all over the world. The people with great ideas and motivations, no matter where they live and what language they speak, will not be isolated from each other anymore.

Cell-phone offers the link between the global information world and any corner of the world which is covered by cell-phone signals. Cell phone is a powerful tool for people to share education/research information and ideas, especially for the ones who have no accesses to Internet temporally or constantly. In many developing countries or areas, for example, cell phone is the major route for people to get useful information from the outside of their local environment. We are going to develop corresponding cell-phone software to complement and expand the application of WISER-U website, especially to help the students and researchers in developing areas.

No matter how advanced Internet-based tools we will have, the significance of learning and research community in real-life should never be neglected. Based on our parallel success in extremely diverse background (Centre de recherche interdisciplinare in Paris and center for theoretical biology in Beijing), we will keep promoting the emergence of real-life communities for pioneering interdisciplinary education and research all over the world. In long-term, the collaboration between these communities will offer the best conditions for students and researchers to learn or work in different context, meet each other, share their knowledge and ideas, collaborate on projects and eventually explore for the solutions of local or global challenges.

WISER-U project will start on July 6th of 2009 at Peking University in China. Le centre de recherche interdisciplinaire (CRI @ Paris) and the center of theoretical biology (CTB @ Peking university, Beijing) will co-organize two workshops for WISER-U: 'Science 2.0' from the 6th to the 12th of July, and 'Education 2.0' from the 29th of July to the 3rd of August, respectively. In these workshops, the students, researchers and professors from the top-level universities of France and China will explore the potentials and possibilities of WISER-U and build international team for the continuous development of WISER-U project. The workshops will cover all the topics in our basic developing strategies: web-tools, wiser-u mobile, real-life community, international/interdisciplinary collaborations and so on. The gathering of creative brains and the open and active community atmosphere in Peking University will significantly increase the chance for WISER-U to take off. (For more information about the WISER-U workshop 2009 at Beijing, please check the developer website: http://2.718281828.org/wiki/ or join the converstion on our blog http://2.718281828.org/blog/ )

WISER-U is a non-profit, open-source and collaborative project. We definitely need the joint efforts from great collaborators to realize our vision. Improving access to, interactions in and the quality of education and research is no doubt an essential driving force for a better future of global human society. We sincerely welcome anybody with the same dreams to join, use or collaborate with WISER-U.