In Hearts, Minds and Screens:Taming the Future Dr. Gilly Salmon (via Stephen Downes - see ref below) gives us 4 alternative visions of a future distributed learning ecology.

As summarized by Stephen Downes (see section 5) those alternatives are:

Contenteous

* technology as a delivery system for content * instructors as content experts * libraries, repositories, databases * institutionally centered

Instantia

* based on the idea of learning objects * instructors as content assemblers * context-senstitive, just-in-time learning * repository or aggregator centered

Nomadict

* learning travels with the learner * mobile learning, alternative delivery systems * learner centered * instructors as 24-hour help desks

Cafélattia

* learning communities, communities of practice * asynchronous and synchronous communication * focus on professional development and tacit knowledge * instructors as moderators

She concludes:

For the teachers:

To be innovative and online, you will need some passion and commitment. You need to experience how to deal with Participation, Emotions and Time online- as highly purposeful interactive activity. At the moment, working online involves shifting time about and changing patterns of how you work with others. It involves setting up a computer and getting the software to work to your satisfaction which may involve going cap in hand to others for help. You may need to rethink your teaching and what[base ']s important about the subject matter you want to teach. It[base ']s great fun when it works. It has its own momentum. Just try it- it[base ']ll turn you into an action researcher, collaborating with your learners. Just try it, please.

For the policy makers, change agents and enablers:

Currently, the [OE]richness[base '] of the Web depends largely on its volume and the multimedia presentation of information. However, I believe the future brings us greater interaction [^] and interaction is fundamental to learning, so long as it is appropriately e-moderated and embedded in the overall learning methods. Focus is essential- explore the scenarios and find the most appropriate combination for your niche. From these small beginnings a new body of knowledge and practice will build up that will transfer again and again as even more connected technologies become available. The need for skillful human intervention will not disappear, regardless of how sophisticated and fast-moving the technological environments become. Train your e-moderators carefully and through the online medium itself. I think that the most successful teaching and learning organisations and associations will be those that understand, recruit, train, support and give free creative rein to their e-moderators, whilst addressing the natural fears of loss of power and perceived quality from traditional teaching staff.

In The Lattecentric Ecosystem Mr. Downes notes

of course they are not four separate alternatives: they are layers of interrelated types of content. They form a single ecosystem. Salmon also argues in favour of education at the level called Cafélattia. This creates what I would call a lattecentric view of education. But learning communities do not exist in isolation; a lattecentric ecosystem is at the center (or the bottom, depending on your perspective) of an atmosphere made up of the other three layers.

At the heart of this ecosystem, if it is to function, is a repository of distributed learning objects. Mr. Downes elucidates as follows:

Educational design, in the first instance, therefore consists in the creation of these environments, of the writing of a (modified and perhaps [restructured]) version of the [thesaurus], making a certain relevant set of objects available for discourse, or providing the tools for and motivation for interaction and the construction, either individually or in groups, of new entities, of the creation of mechanisms and guidelines for pointing, suggesting, even cajoling, of having a broader understanding of the wider ecosystem and of creating a microcosm of that ecosystem.

Educational design, in the second instance, lies in the creation of these objects and mechanisms through which they would be delivered. At greater levels of complexity, such objects may have the specific intent to teach a concept, and may resemble a traditional design of learning objectives, content, exercises and even assessment. But [many] other designs are possible: simple simulations designed to animate a concept, a collection of film clips designed to illustrate a sequence of events, summaries and analyses of articles and papers and more.

At yet a further layer, educational design involves the creation of the raw materials from which these more complex entities are constructed, the creation of single clips from which a sequence is derived, the creation of expository works out of which a lesson is designed. There is no [attempt] at this level to recreate the entire educational experience; the point is to create, if you will, a large and complex vocabulary of individual concepts.

And the nature of instructional systems design, properly so-called, lies in the creation of networks of interactions between these layers, in the manner in which raw materials will be presented for use by people creating learning objects, and in the manner in which learning objects are presented to students working within a lattecentric educational environment.