There will be a diverse ecology of solutions, none of which will individually replace the current system.

I even hesitate a little at the use of ‘”university-level” learning’ despite the quotes. I think we need to get away from these hierarchical concepts altogether and instead focus on usefulness and relevancy. “University-level” physics is (mostly) irrelevant to someone who wants to become a literary writer. And, I don’t mean “useful and relevant” to imply that we should only be concerned with economically important trades. For someone seeking self-actualization and enlightenment it might be the classics of philosophy or theology that are useful and relevant.

So, in response to your first point I would say we need easily accessible systems that provide relevant information at whatever level a given individual needs. Those systems might have highly disparate designs and funding mechanisms for different domains.

With regard to your second hesitation I think the same point (as above) applies to the need for domain appropriate collaborative networks.

I recognize that this is somewhat of a non-answer, but to get more specific we may need to refer to specific domains or specific types of behaviors, exchanges, relationships, etc.

You may be right that learning will be integrated into everything we do. I hope that’s the case. But I offer two hesitations. One, change happens over time in layers. Past, current, and future artifacts co-exist contemporaneously. For example, students currently pay to attend colleges and universities. Getting from that reality to a different tomorrow where “university-level” learning is available to everyone throughout the world at an affordable (eg, free) price is going to be a stretch. My belief is that alternative currencies can play a pivotal role in the transition, but I do not know enough about these alternatives to figure out how it might work.

My second hesitation is that much learning requires a social context not suitable for DIY activities. I’ll mention just one … mentoring. People learn by trying, failing, experimenting, failing again, researching, failing, talking with other learners in the same situation, and perhaps understanding or reaching a to-be-continued state. The presence of mentors, either peer or more experienced, can be essential to the ease of this process and the impact it has on the learner. Somewhere in there I believe we’ll see broad expansions in the concept of common-pool knowledge resources (eg, a simple example are what we now call Open Educational Resources), in the concept of learner-cum-creator-cum-mentor, and (I believe) in a concept of “gift and receive” that involves alternative currencies which obsolete purchase and sale.

Thanks very much for your question.

I am curious what you mean by “the finances of tomorrow’s learning”. I don’t really expect tomorrow’s learning to be subject to a unique financial infrastructure the way education is today. Just as “internet” is now integrated into everything we do, I expect learning will be integrated into everything we do.

A firefox plugin acting as a webserver seems like an ideal approach – as a cross-browser and easy-to-install component which is easily hackable and extensible with widely understood HTML-oriented libraries for presentation and data entry as well as dynamic AJAX-like interactions with a backing data set which lives on the hard drive.

I see this being used in order to create data-driven websites or for non-techies to hack their own personal information managers.

XQuery in the browser would be a useful facility, but for now, I’m planning to use something like Saxon running XQueries, triggered by POW – David Kellogg’s Plain Old Webserver.
http://davidkellogg.com/wiki/Main_Page

Some of the XML processing tasks are doable with XPath driven by Javascript directly in the page without any additional plugins in Firefox at least.

It may be that the facilities required for this project will need direct access to the OS capabilites anyway (i.e. writing files onto the harddrive), so would not be able to run inside a browser sandbox even if XQuery was available to it.

Please say hi to the DA folks for me.

Usmanou