LEVEL FOUR: REAL WORLD PROBLEM-SOLVING:
Building Learning Communities, Learning to Earn, and Electronic Democracy

CONTEXT:With the very nature of work changing as students grow up, they need to identify new processes for identifying emerging work opportunities in their communities. The jobs they will likely conduct may well not exist today.

Involvement in the process of identifying emerging needs, and filling those niches with genuine value and services, can be taught through a project-based approach to real community issues and problems. Due to the Internet's increasing efficiency and popularization, new opportunities, with a global significance and reach, are being continually created. One only has to look at those who are succeeding providing services and products via the Internet to see why home-based businesses are flourishing.

While the Internet can indeed be a window of unlimited opportunity, one must have the capacity for visioning that which is yet to come, and develop the skill to spot inevitable trends. These trends are typically based on common sense application of the new capabilities to meet existing needs as the Internet evolves.

Bill Gates book "The Road Ahead" states the three big growth areas in our economy will be 1. Entertainment, 2. Social Services and 3. Education. The author of this handbook suggests "Fun Social Learning" as the themes that unifies these economic growth areas. If we're all to be lifelong learners, its a necessity we be able to depend on the knowledge others possess, that we share what we ourselves know, and that this be an enjoyable ongoing process.

Common sense suggests that together, we'd all have access to virtually all knowledge, and alone we'd have access only to our own knowledge. The social processes by which this can happen, using collaborative technologies, is in the very early stages of evolution. It will ultimately prove to be a far more "human" issue than a "technologies" issue.