One of the keynotes at the WebCT conference was Marc Hamilton the Systems Engineering Director, Global Education and Research at Sun Microsystems. His talk was pretty interesting, if I understood him correctly. He was talking about Project Liberty amongst other things, and was talking about single login, ie login details would be stored on a few secure central servers like the DNS systems instead of on a disparate collection of databases across multiple e-commerce sites and web services.
With reference to e-learning he was saying that a child of 4 would get a username and password when entering school and they could use that to login to any of their learning environments throughout their life.
It was the first time I had heard of Project Liberty. Here's a current list of members:
http://www.projectliberty.org/membership/members.asp