My 'ideal future' looks something like this:
Both because of pressures from many different avenues, as well as the increased awareness of how they can use the network to increase their value and usefulness, institutions and instructors start to 'open up' both their content and educational processes. It starts slowly at first, but by 2020 it becomes commonplace to find Massively Open Online Courses online, the communities and networks which they tap into, spawn and help nurture often far outlasting the short duration of the course. Instructors still get paid, institutions still credential, but many many more people benefit from the actual learning content and processes. Indeed, while institutions still exist, they are much clearer in their focus and mandate, and within society there are many new ways that become generally recognized as ways to become learned. "Open Source" learning communities abound. The term 'personal learning environments' now sounds quaint, as increasingly ubiquitous access to the network and to learning and collaborating with others in it, across many existing boundaries, is now the norm.
Over the 10 year period, translation technologies leap forward, spawning the 'Translating Telephone' - a phone-based device that can translate either text or speech on the fly. This innovation, which even 10 years earlier had seemed like science fiction, suddenly enables learners in all nations to access scores of content and learners that had previously been inaccessible to them. Both the developed and developing world come to understand network access as both a fundamental right and a key enabler of innovation; while it works out differently in different jurisdictions, the basic tenets of net neutrality survive the first two decades of the 21st Century and create a renaissance as never witnessed before. (Hey, I did say 'ideal'!)
More locally - in BC, by 2020 there are 4 more post-secondary schools running OCW-like projects on a large scale, and many other smaller scale initiatives under way; the province and BCcampus supports this and gradually abandons the 'BC Commons license' in favour of fully open content licenses (like CC-Attribution). BC leads the way in Canada in preserving net neutrality, and these efforts at promoting open content, open education and access help it weather the global economic collapse much better than many jurisdictions. BC becomes a leader in sustainable green technologies, especially around forestry, wind and aquaculture, and helps pioneer co-opetition partnerships with many developing nations through opening up access to the underlying technologies and knowledge.
And what am *I* doing to try and bring this about? Everything I can ;-) I know the above picture likely sounds naive to many people, but I'll trade that over its alternative any day.
I am a pretty slow learner - I intuitively gravitate to many different issues and projects without explicitly understanding how they fit together. But after 7 years working on OER, and 16 on the web, I have started to see that my interests and work on PLEs, on mashups, on the educational browser, on blogs and wikis, on Open Content and OER, on Network Learning, on Net Neutrality and copyright... were all about the same thing - helping people take control of their learning in an easy and sustainable way that leads to an increase in the collective consciousness. Which I now realize isn't that surprising, because the first person I ever worked for explained to me that this is exactly what we were doing. It just took me this long to figure it out for myself.