Table of Contents:

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION: NEEDS, and OPPORTUNITY

Concerns
Basic Needs
Distance anf Flexible Education Needs
Diplomas and Accreditation Needs
THE CENTRAL QUESTION: Life-world Harmony versus Market Potency
FUNCTIONAL MORPHOLOGY - possible configurations
Virtual Media of Exchange - E-money and Distance/open/flexible learning
Non-convertibility

REFERENCES

ABSTRACT

Taking the position that broadening and deepening multi-perspectival learning conversations is the core activity of education, and that multivocal discourse is required for that, then what is most needed for Internet/WWW-based distance education is a way to facilitate match-making, and support for fair give-&-take among learners who tutor, and tutors-who are also learners.

There are many adult and even adolescent learners who also have achieved enough competence in subject matter areas and tutoring skills to be able to be effective peer-tutors or teachers, while also wanting or needing tutoring themselves in other areas. And everyone wants and needs a reputation and public recognition for his or her helpfulness. If good matches can be arranged in cyberspace to connect learners to appropriate tutors, and if fair give-&-take and public regognition can be ensured then a great flowering of life-long learning should occur.

For this potential synergy to be actualized requires that participants should have confidence that their help-offerings will be reciprocated by suitable help from others. It also requires a trusted means to check up on reciprocal commitments promised, and an agency to monitor & report the quality of the actual learning-conversation tutorials held.

Possible and practicable configurations for providing such peer-tutored, and machine tutored, distance education are outlined on the basis of three technical developments: AI agents, webcentric mediation via downloaded applets with "cookie" feedback, and especially virtual currency exchange via public key encryption, which together, it is argued, offer particularly good options to distance learners and educators provided suitable (public) on web agencies can be arranged to referee the activity. A community of learner-teachers in cyberspace may in this way become a major cultural survival propagation and reformation mechanism.

Concerns

Immediately my main concern in putting forward these ideas is to facilitate a world-wide flowering of collaborative life-long culturally symbiotic education via the Internet, and face-to-face(Boyd, 1994).

"What binds associated individuals to one another and secures the integration of society is a web of communicative actions that thrives only in the light of cultural traditions, and not systemic mechanisms that are out of the reach of a Lifeworld member's intuitive knowledge"( Habermas, 1981/7, p. 149.) Ultimately my main concern is to contribute to the strengthening of the "life-world" as it undergoes continued onslaughts from the techonomic monetarized world market machine system. Or to put it another way: to contribute toward eco-co-cultural symbioses on Earth. Distance Education institutions and dual mode institutions and informal web-based tutoring can all contribute to a better world future, if the cost and distribution barriers can be overcome.

Basic Needs
Fundamental Needs for Multi-perspectival Learning Conversations

The need for more and better learning conversations does not arise primarily from the demands of technology as is often argued but rather from "people's great hunger for redemption and transcendence"(Berger 80 p. 167). Or as John Dewey put it "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."

Culturally-rooted affiliative meaning is an actualisation need which, except under dire deprivation conditions, takes precedence over merely instrumental needs. As Peter Berger (1979) pointed out with his "heretical imperative" thesis: when we live next door to decent happy helpful people, who nevertheless have entirely different religious beliefs, it becomes imperative to realize that ours is not the one and only truth. Multiple perspectives need to be shared to enable cultural symbioses. Co-cultural, and ecological-cultural symbiosis is necessary if we are to continue to survive on planet Earth (Hawken, 1993).

Curiously, as technology improves there is NOT more need for detailed human technological expertise but LESS, since such expertise becomes handily packaged in software. Expert "Artificially Intelligent" assistant-agents can now diagnose many technical problems, and exhibit possible solutions. Now therefore THE human act is to make "humanly" meaningful choices among the options exhibited, not (except in rarer instances) to actually do the complex analyses.

Most earlier distance education systems tended to package and broadcast mono-vocal material. Our older recording and broadcast media (print, film, radio, TV, video) did not readily accommodate interactive knowledge construction dialogue, nor was such discourse fashionable in behaviorist times. A notable exception was the pioneering use of the telephone by the University of Wisconsin Extension (Parker, 1976) people. Now however, interactive media such as e-mail and the World Wide Web offer much better options for multiple perspective knowledge construction conversations for those who can afford access (Boyd, 1996).

A long history of research on rates of completion and academic success in adult distance education programmes has shown these outcomes to be very strongly associated with the amount of support provided to the learner by family, employers and peer learners (Sweet,1989), (Carrier, 1990), (Miller, 1996). The provision of professional tutorial help for distance learning students regardless of media (letters, telephone, e-mail) is quite expensive for distance education institutions (Daniel, 1996). Therefore it is particularly important that ways be developed to inexpensively obtain the conversational support of significant others for distance learners. Peer tutors, and mentors in the given field of study are especially helpful if they can be enlisted through collaborative good-will or barter arrangements.

All of us have a great deal to learn, and all adults and even many adolescents have, from their unique experiences, something symbiotically valuable to teach. The difficulty arises however, that what you may learn from me may not be as valuable to you, as what I may learn from you is to me, in a given learning conversation. In which case, you may feel it is only fair to be paid for the difference somehow. At the least a promise of some more cogent tutoring from someone else would be good. It seems then that what might be most helpful and affordable is a way to facilitate match-making, and support for fair give-&-take among learners who tutor, and tutors-who are also learners.

Quite apart from actual learning support needs, there are needs for credentials to prove that we have learned something, or at least have met the legal requirements for some trade or profession.

These requirements seem to be much easier to deal with as long as there is some officially approved examination setting and administering agency. The well respected external degree examinations of the University of London were a notable pioneering venture in of this kind. Nowadays when we consider on-line learning there are two main obstacles to giving valid examinations cheaply: the first is to be able to identify who is actually sitting the exams, the second is to validly examine for psychomotor (e.g. surgery, flying, dance) and for psycho-social (eg. interviewing, hypnotizing, acting skills).

Today, the most certain way to ensure that a given person actually sits an exam is still to have a trusted human proctor watch them at it. Someday voice recognition for orals, or retinal imaging, and fingertip recognition for typed answers may become practicable - not yet. However, even now with current commercial e-cash systems - similar to debt-card swipe terminals with PIN numbers which people are naturally very reluctant to confide in anyone else (Kleiner, 1995), buying on-line examinations is possible. Someone trustworthy must however watch to see that no-one else substitutes for the person who originally logged on.

In the modern world when someone has nothing to trade directly for goods or a service which they want they resort to money and a market mechanism. In the past in small face to face communities, and especially in religiously coherent communities it was acceptable that everyone took what they needed and gave what they could (the widows' mite). Giving a lot resulted in high status as with the West coast Indian potlach (Clutesi). Karl Marx, and others have tried to extend this "from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs" modus operandii to modern industrial societies with very little success. The most notable modern exception is that of scientific communities where one's status depends on how much potent value one gives to the community (not what one can amass), and where not merely coincidentally the ftp-open Internet originated.

However, when free give-and-take is replaced by a market mechanism in order to enlarge the population of participants and thereby to provide the precise requisite tutoring variety needed by each person, communal harmony of collective being tends to be replaced by competitive individualism. Interestingly even Adam Smith (1759) realised this, and paused in his writing of the WEALTH OF NATIONS, in order to write what he hoped would be a counterbalancing work THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS. The fragmentation of identification caused by market systems in turn weakens concern for eco-co-cultural symbiosis. So that implementing market & money mediation usually results in specialized learning being bought at the expense of the will to apply that learning for the eco-co-cultural public good (eg. medical school graduates who refuse practise in rural regions). Probably there is little harm to the life-world in requiring people to pay reasonable prices for the examination and credentialling services of educational and professional institutions, as long as there is some competition among providers. Let us strive however, to develop our world-wide free-market in distance education so that it will benefit all, not like the world money market which mainly benefits only the rich and the ruthless (Soros, 1997).

The central question now becomes:
How can the requisite-variety benefits of a very big open educational market be achieved without further destruction of the personal life world, and without alienating learners and teachers from identification with our common tasks as crew of space-ship Earth, and as seekers of the transcendentally good?

Connectivity & Cybermediators-How possible?
What sort of go-between systems are necessary? possible? desirable?
My current silver-bullet idea: is for an Internet-based lifelong-learning money-free brokerage for high-quality relevant attention-time barter, to be mediated by public-key-encrypted we-owe-you vouchers. The tricky bit is how to arrange it to promote `wise-collective-being' not just more of the now rampant opportunistic crimepetitive individualism!

One of the most basic and satisfying human Life-world roles is that of the "go-between" or "match-maker", so it would be tragic to automate it out of existence.
However, when matches need to be made between millions of requests and offerings, some quasi-intelligent automation is certainly required.

Conventional markets employ middlemen who make assortments aimed to please their customers, the editors of journals do the same thing. Most traditional correspondence schools and open universities have offered rather limited ranges of courses aimed at particular clienteles. Usually both distance and conventional education institutions assemble degree programme packages which it is hoped will cover most of the basic and current needs for some particular profession, often as specified by an accreditation body. Inevitably in such systems much is taught which is irrelevant or even useless to any given student. Much which students need to learn is not taught at all.

On-line "just-in-time" instruction can be a good alternative. Indeed it can be excellent if appropriate instruction can be located and obtained when needed, and provided that what is to be learned is not heavily dependent on pre-requisite learning.

A learning requests-to-offers broker must have a suitable profile of the learner (have a `learner model' in ITS terms) as well as having a good description of the target capabilities (knowledge/skills/values) to be mastered, and also of the probably-good teaching-learning strategies available to be prescribed. This is a tall order. Person-machine collaboration is clearly indicated, but what kind?

A computercations-sophisticated learner can send out sho's own AI agents to wander around the net to look for and retrieve what sho wants. However, creating and deploying such customized search and recover agents is no trivial matter (Cheong, 1996). Others can use existing web search engines such as AltaVista or Yahoo, or ERIC, but are then confronted with difficult and time-consuming search-strategy and returns-sorting tasks.

Supposing one finds apparently relevant material, then who or what can you get to help you to evaluate and learn it? -and at what cost? One's attention-time costs are usually the main costs of learning, and important time savings come through being taught well.

One possibility is for people -librarians, human cybermediators etc. to come to one's aid - for a fee, or payment in kind. The latter is possible in a big enough network, since different people have widely different areas of expertise - all of which someone somewhere probably needs.

Promises of aid-in-kind in cyberspace need to be backed up by authentication certificates from some trusted institution because there is no real place where participants are bound to ongoing contact with one-another. The authenticating institution has to be trusted by both requestors and providers to keep honest records of real identities, and of who did what for whom and how well promises were kept, and how many promises each has made, and to maintain privacy (Kleiner, 1995) except in agreed respects.

All this is certainly technically possible with AI agents, public-key encryption, and appropriate accountability institutions. Whether such cybermediated just-in-time tutoring is a politically economically and paedagogically practicable form of distance education remains to be discovered.

If one takes the position that broadening and deepening multi-perspectival learning conversations is the core activity of education, we also need to recognize and celebrate the primacy of the life-worlds in the sense that for example: perhaps high-level live-personal attention should be bartered only for other live personal attention, not sold for any kind of money.

We also need to be able to exchange just-in-time micro-tutorial help. There is a need for composite (transvidual) volunteers who will reliably do jobs on a continuing basis while their members take turns in being the operative, i.e.-job-sharing with perfect information.

For successful realisation, a society of intelligent agents "cybermediators" is needed to establish connections throughout a large population of learner-tutors, and to keep track of the commitments made.

Probably weak technical security features are a good idea ( as are fading/ ephemeral credits), because they will discourage attempts to turn learning-help credits into "real" money. Conversion to real money is bad because it enables resources to be extracted from the learning community, and also because it invites taxation. The USA IRS has exempted barter of people's time from taxation, but material goods and especially real-money based transactions must be taxed. (Canadian GST -a value-added tax - is not applied to educational tuition, but is still applied to textbooks.)

CONCLUSION

Research is needed in this area now. Formative evaluation research on of various transaction mechanisms is needed, with emphasis placed on the socio-cultural learning as well as the attractiveness, practical workableness, and efficiency of the various options. I am currently negitating to try out experimentally a version of digital credits (SAVIE-credits) with the Quebec Societe' pour l'Apprentissage a Vie (website: ).

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URLs of RELEVANT WEBSITES concerning Virtual currency & time-barter & community development:
Lietaer, Bernard A. (http://www.transaction.net/web/conf/confintro) .

Henderson, Hazel (http://www.auburn.edu/tann/hazel/).
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