I suggest that we are now presented with a fundamentally new possibility for 21st
century learningscapes. Imagine a hybrid model of learning, where we combine the
power of passion-based participation in niche communities of practice with a limited
core curriculum for teaching the rigorous thinking and argumentation specific to that
field. Designing such a curriculum would require an “elegant minimalism.” It is
implicit in this new learningscape that, given the nearly infinite number of niche
communities that exist on the net, nearly every student of any age will find something
that he or she is passionate about. For middle and high school students, finding and
joining such communities could well happen outside formal schooling and could even
become a new role for community public libraries. In college, such communities most
likely would be campus-based--whether on the student’s own or another campus.