Standards, textbooks, and curricula are vehicles that set limits — like:
This is the arithmetic students learn in the 3rd grade, or
Middle school science includes earthquakes but not galaxies.
Online there is limitless room for everything that could be learned about everything.
Another way limits are avoided online is that information is organized into a commons network by cognitive relationships, not by whether somebody thinks fourth graders should learn it.
There is also no delay online in how soon students can share in new knowledge, as there is in waiting for standards to be figured out and textbooks to be printed.
The completeness and freshness of online commons is illustrated by a new page today at the European Space Agency website. The illustration above is from an animation of ESA’s Planck satellite as it scans the complete sky. It will take a long time for standards to include Planck, and this new science:
Giant filaments of cold dust stretching through our Galaxy are revealed in a new image from ESA’s Planck satellite. Analysing these structures could help to determine the forces that shape our Galaxy and trigger star formation.
Planck is principally designed to study the biggest mysteries of cosmology. How did the Universe form? How did the galaxies form? This new image extends the range of its investigations into the cold dust structures of our own Galaxy. . . .
