I see her argument as an extension of Tim O'Reilly's essay "The Architecture of Participation" . And I see it as a Marxist way of viewing political and economic agency as a function of some idea substructure. Although I find it intriguing that Watters uses a mesh metaphor at the end of the post. We are enmeshed in rather than standing upon political and philosphical assumptions and axioms.

I cannot begin to say what "future-facing" means. I am reminded of an old George Carlin routine where he notes that a plastic Jesus in one's car is probably facing the wrong way. If Jesus is helping you, then he ought to be looking at the damned road, right, not you. I don't think we need to project onto the future a roadmap (template) especially one that is as waste-ridden and futile as 'school'. Talk about a manifestion of Eliot's wasteland. Rather I think we need to feedforward from the future. We need to imagine what we mean by content and context delivery and connected learning and the programmable web. Then we need to allow ourselves to be drawn toward that future as we live in the present. And we need to allow ourselves to modify that future present like a feedback loop.

learning as a process that develops the __.

You fill in the blank with your own expertise NOT HERS or any others. If this all about power and control then the ends and means must be about that as well, even to the point of arguing individually for the idea that content is king.