The section title refers on the one hand to analyses and reflections on contemporary societal conditions, and on the other hand it refers to pathways of energy flows. Positives and negatives combine, stability and instabilities converge; change is the result and different eras reflect different forces.

1. Relevance stories: The chapter serves as a context for the book, following up on the introduction, which will be more of a book content orientation. Chapter one will outline cases and examples from around the world centering on the key issues of the book.
   
2. Contemporary challenges in higher: education
3. Global perspectives:
4. A review of research literature:

The emerging ecosystem of higher education is not easily understood without a reference to communications technologies. And that reference has a long history and a more recent one. In this section the focus is on the intersection of those two trajectories.

While the university as a social institution has existed for centuries, the concept and role of higher education in society has changed dramatically and unevenly on a global scale since WW2. The societal roles and impacts of higher education and research was in a sense rebooted with the invention of modern statistics. Decolonialisation changed the role of education in the global south. Globalization is now reshaping networks of networks in inter-national education. Technologies converge around satellite communication, digitalisation, computer efficiency and artificial intellicence.

1. Humboldt: The idea of a university
2. Standardization: The Bologna process
   
3. Globalization: UNESCO and the post-WW2 era
   
4. Education and the Internet

While the university as a social institution has existed for centuries, the concept and role of higher education in society has changed dramatically and unevenly on a global scale since WW2. The societal roles and impacts of higher education and research was in a sense rebooted with the invention of modern statistics. Decolonialisation changed the role of education in the global south. Globalization is now reshaping networks of networks in inter-national education. Technologies converge around satellite communication, digitalisation, computer efficiency and artificial intellicence.

1. Google: The idea of a university
2. Knowledge and the Internet
3. Technology: Four dimensions of knowledge
4. Education´s global future

Much of the discussion regarding “future learning” and technology centers on pedagogy and on technology itself. And yet, the spaces we inhabit are key influences on how we interact, how we think, how we understand the particular kinds of knowledge pursued in higher education, and the particular kinds of vested interests that co-shape institutions.

1. Space oddyssees: Boundaries, angles, flows, scales
2. Connecting spaces
   
3. Combining spaces
   
4. Cultivating spaces

As social institutions, universities and colleges are change-agents and custodians of stability at one and the same time. They are commercially driven, many of them. Others are politically  contextualized. Ideologically, institution of higher education base themselves on research, with a key idea to pursue as balanced and objective insight as possible. In this final section, focus shifts to the question of how to firmly ground a critique of higher education? At what level does one critique a discipline, a cluster of disciplines, organizations, financial arrangements, vested interests?

1. Material conditions
   
2. Affecting change
   
3. Management in complex organizations
4. Becoming and remaining a student