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communities. However, the rapidly growing information on the Web and intranets causesproblems when searching for and accessing information. Likewise, the same problemoccurs when individuals are trying to organize and share resources 6 . One problem with thegrowing digital archives is that content often is moulded into proprietary and applicationdependant formats and therefore difficult to retrieve, access and reuse in any other contextthan that in the one in which they are produced.Ten years ago, individual researchers, research groups and archivists typically usedproprietary non - portable formats for their depositories of digitalized sources, for examplein the humanities electronic versions of printed texts, transcribed manuscripts or languagecorpora. Today there are de facto encoding 7 standards, such as the TEI DTD (the TextEncoding Initiative Document Type Definition) 8 within the humanities, which permitsscholars to create, use and share collections of well structured high quality digital sources.The same kind of development has taken place within most scholarly domains, as well asin many industries but not in the same extent in the teaching practices in higher education.This means that the educational milieus are lagging behind the research communities.However, most teachers and students do not take part in this development. They are stillreferred to printed material, poorly structured HTML pages or non–reusable PDF files. Thequalified digital sources they encounter are more often than not only available onproprietary systems and formats that may function well as long as the material stays on theweb site or on the CD-ROM. Students and teachers meet with problems as soon as they tryto incorporate material into their learning environment, for example in order to accomplishprojects or to create tailor–built courseware. Course content is, thus, not sufficientlyintegrated into the learning environment. 9Why then, deschooling information? When Ivan Illich launched his campaign 30 years agoagainst the schooling of society, the educational system was the first in a row of severalattacks (titled accordingly) on the augmented professionalism and the top–downmanagement of schools making students powerless and therefore prevents people fromlearning. Illich proposed the need to replace schools with libraries as the natural arena forlearning to expose the authoritarian hidden curriculum of education. 10 The idea that schoolscould be replaced by networks of information proposed by Illich I think is relevant in somerespects especially in terms of what kind of opportunities it might bring for educationalpractices. Firstly because the flows of information have become easier to reach e.g. by usesof information technology and secondly because greater possibilities for both producersand users to manipulate and use the content of information. Indeed, that may be part whatIvan Illich was looking for when he wrote in Deschooling Society and as part of hisproposal of learning webs, Illich thought of ways to “[...] provide the learner with new6 What is a resource? It might consist of almost any kind of representation and a digital resource is any objector location that has a unique identifier and can be digitally stored, accessed and distributed via a global/localarea network. A resource could be e.g. web pages, course modules, lecture notes, reports, papers, digitalarchives, a record in database or a student digital portfolio.7 The purpose of encoding a text or other kinds of data is to provide information in order to add some kind offunctionality such as assisting a computer programs to perform actions on that text. A common kind ofsimple encoding is HTML which allows the web browser to display a given resource such as a text withoutshowing the actual encoding i.e. the tags.8 The guidelines from the consortium TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) are the dominating de facto-standard forencoding textual resources such as digital critical editions of literary and historical sources. Seehttp://www.tei-c.org/9 These issues have been presented and discussed by Broady in “Det nya handbiblioteket” (1995), “Contentdesign. Methods and tools for the creation of portable hypermedia archives” (1997 ) and “Digitala arkiv ochportföljer” (2001) but also to some extent by other, for example Julia Flanders in her article “Learning,Reading, and the Problem of Scale: Using Woman Writers Online.” (2002).10 See Illich in “Deschooling Society” (1971a) but also Illich, 1970 and 1971b.pm-030505.doc utkast avh.pm. Monica Langerth Zetterman 3(34)