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The joy of learning is among the most valuable ways to find meaning in life. Combine that with the substantial imbalance between supply and demand of skilled labor in the United States, and a period of economic upheaval, and you've got a recipe for for something magical to happen.

While traditional schools struggle to fit the bill, the internet is finally rising the the occasion. Startups like Treehouse, CodeAcademy, Lynda.com and of course Khan Academy are capturing the imagination of learners around the world, of all ages. Can these sites give traditional education the "Wikipedia vs. the encyclopedia" treatment? Why are these new websites aimed at teaching new skills so hot right now? A discussion of those questions leaves me feeling very optimistic, for the future of humanity even.

Amy Webb wasn't planning on starting another business. But two years ago, as revenue-strapped newspapers began closing down or laying off staff, the former reporter and editor turned digital media consultant decided to step in and help her former colleagues.

Webb, who was already running a successful company geared toward bringing traditional media organizations up to speed with digital technology, pulled together some of her fellow consultants and scheduled a free webinar for recently laid off journalists. Not long after the two-hour primer on must-have digital media skills ended, Webb and her colleagues started getting emails from would-be participants begging to know when the next one would be. By the second webinar, 50 participants had ballooned to over 200, and a third session had 600 sign-ups.

Research from Harvard Medical School has resulted in a pretty sharp SaaS learning system. SpacedEd, as it is called, uses a simple question and answer format that adapts to the person's level of knowledge.

Today the adaptive technology is taking a leap into the business world with SpacedEd Enterprise, a service designed for corporations and for-profit educational groups.

We like tools that are fascinating to use and make users look smarter than their peers. Visualization apps and sites rank pretty high on the fascination-o-meter, and they're also great for those of us who learn best by seeing and doing, rather than simply reading text.

The folks at Thinkmap (the makers of Visual Thesaurus) have just launched a tool called VocabGrabber that is absolutely as cool to play with, as it is informative and useful. It takes any text a user chooses (it can process an obscene amount of copy - up to 200,000 characters, or about 100 pages) and parses it for likely vocabulary words, organizing them in several fascinating ways and showing linguistic and contextual links to other terms.