There's a lot to be said about directed learning, totally. I wish I had a mentor growing up. But I've given up on easy learning.. that is, I've picked a lot of low hanging fruit and now I want to learn about quantum mechanics beyond an intuition level (I'd like to do the complicated math), so I have Feynman, Dirac, et al. What I like about Khan material is the brevity, but that doesn't work for all subjects. In the book department Schaum's Outlines for Stuff tend to fit my style well; I like having worked examples so I can pick up the patterns. If only I could just implant knowledge into myself with a chip-to-brain interface as in the Matrix!

If we did away with state-controlled curricula I think that'd help in itself. Even the schools where you supposedly "learn what you want" have workbooks you have to follow very orderly to "pass the material". The nature of state-curricula leaves it up to the arbitrary decisions of boards and a handful of teachers instead of experimenting and doing radical changes and letting individual teachers do their own thing to see how it works out. But this is all for a classroom setting.

There are lots of places we can use HI (human) more effectively... The whole Stack Overflow / Yahoo Answers model is great too, adding an interface to auto-connect people via webcam/mic/screensharing would be nifty instead of a series of text messages.