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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.

If you are looking for a way to do extensive online training on online topics, then consider what Grovo.com has to offer. There are dozens of topics ranging from email etiquette to setting up Facebook ads to using Yammer, Stumble Upon, Google Analytics, Twitter and LinkedIn. While I didn't try out very many courses, it does seem well thought out. Many large Fortune 1000 companies are using the service, too. In this era where training budgets are being slashed and where keeping up with the latest online technology is difficult, this is worth a closer look.

The OpenStack platform is evolving pretty rapidly, but there's plenty left to do – like training. Companies looking to deploy OpenStack may have a hard time finding in-house talent or hiring folks with experience. To help pave the way for OpenStack growth, and to make a few bucks in the process, Rackspace has announced a global training program to get admins and developers up to speed.

One of the first victims of a hurricane (or a flood or a tornado or an earthquake) is the sense of control. The trauma of survivors often centers not on loss of life alone, or of property, but of a belief in the individual as an actor. In children it is particularly acute.

Game company Area/Code believes gaming, something most kids are already familiar with, can help build up and preserve kids' sense of worth and consequence. They are not only designed a game to do so, "Battlestorm," but with the help of the Knight Foundation, the United Way and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, they staged live competitive gaming with an online aspect to stress the power of kids to survive and overcome the threat of a disaster.

Anyone who's ever been responsible for training staff members on software or internal processes knows it's no simple feat, especially at smaller companies with fewer resources.

It's precisely this challenge that Mindflash aims to resolve with its online training management platform, which came out of beta earlier this week.

Tomorrow San Francisco-based Enki Sports is bundling wireless sensors and the Web together into a real-time integrated training system that you communicate with via your smartphone.

"The system will coach the athlete based on their training plan, monitor's the athlete's performance via wireless sensors and provide feedback during performance to help the athlete follow their plan," according to COO Jeff Broderick.

Altus, which offers a cloud-based video hosting solution that focuses on training enterprise sales forces, just announced the release of its new and improved video platform. Altus can work with any video, no matter whether its a teleconference, WebEx meeting, internal meeting, or a video of a corporate event. Besides making these videos available on a customizable portal, the company also transcribes them and makes them searchable.

What can be done to help professional news organizations survive in this internet era? The New York Times made mention this weekend of a particularly interesting project in the Czech Republic. Google is providing local staff to train reporters in one hyperlocal news network in the use of services like Google Maps, Google Translate and YouTube.

An Amsterdam based holding company called PPF and the Paris based World Association of Newspapers are funding a fascinating project that will launch 30 different websites covering hyperlocal news throughout the Czech Republic. Google will provide technical training and the sites will run AdSense in exchange. In order to maximize contact with the local community, the project has hired 90 mostly young reporters who will work out of offices with public coffee and internet shops built into the facilities.

Teaching people how to use new tools on the internet is hard. Learning through experience is the most effective method, but it's slow. More and more of us are finding ourselves teaching other people how to use new web apps and services - sometimes professionally.

Though you, elite readers, might consider getting excited about apps that are a year or two old to be painfully behind the times, the fact is that there is huge demand for training in use and application of web apps old and new.