Artichoke: Edubloggers as “Prisoners of the nation state.”

Some phrase just resonate - for example this one from Artichoke at edubloggers - "We have been seduced by our inability to imagine ourselves as superfluous to student learning."
We talk about the freedom and autonomy afforded by social software and web 2.0, the democratization of the learning experience - and we have been talking for years about student centered learning and constructivism - but ultimately we have been doing no more than peering outside the box we are in because "We have been seduced by our inability to imagine ourselves as superfluous to student learning."

As Stephen Downes has stated before we are still talking about learning as if it is just a retrofit of what came before "to promote a view of learning that is traditionalist, rather than oriented to the future, one that seeks to preserve the existing trappings of education, most notably, schools. But with the advent of web 2.0 we should be looking at changing the definition of learning - to get rid of our mindset and "to use technologies to leverage our ability to personalize learning, facilitate students' learning while taking part as full citizens in the wider community.

Artichoke reaches into the past to quote Ivan Illich and show us how our thinking has fossilized -

"A good education system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and finally furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.” - Ivan Illich 1971

Does this description require a classroom? A school? A teacher? An instructional designer? A subject matter expert? A single web site? A learning management system? Does it require a set of controls? Prescribed subjects and established content? Ulitmately the only constant should be the learner.