This paper addresses the educational challenge of information technology in relation to education and democratic practice by drawing upon the experiences of the CIEL project funded by the Dept. for Education and Science (£200,000) under the national 'Cybrarian' programme (£35 million) and the Recremania project (EU funded, 700,000 Euros). The CIELproject is a study of the challenges involved in sharing practice across organisations, both within an educational sector and across sectors, to improve the use of e-learning. Research has been carried out at both strategic and practical levels through linked 'case studies' focussing on a range of 'study areas'. The outcomes are a series of e-learning developments and reports producing results which inform on key issues in preparation for roll out across the UK. The Recremania project has as its aim to foster communication between children across Europe through the sharing of their musical heritage. This is being accomplished through the creation of an interactive music platform. The CIEL and Recremania projects provide the context within which key issues concerning the democratization of schools and learning across communities can be explored at personal, professional, local and international levels. The CIEL project employs an open source collaborative content management system called WIKITIKI. This is a secure environment providing on-line wordprocessing, e-mail, chat rooms, voting systems, the streaming of music, video and computer conferencing. This paper will explore its impact in a middle school (children aged 8-12) in East Anglia. This collaborative environment is highly flexible and open ended. It enables children to explore their own interests and collaborate in ways that are fluid, seemingly anarchic. The teachers have been amazed at the sophistication, the creativity, the co-operation to which this has given rise. Indeed, parents have been drawn into the project by the fascination that the environment seems to hold for their children. The traditional relationships between teachers and pupils have been suspended in the on-line collaborative environment. The same framework is employed in order to assess the educational impact of on-line music within the Recremania project. The lessons of these experiments will contribute to the recommendations for the Cybrarian programme. Essentially, these are massive projects/programmes which will have a critical impact at National and international levels. It is thus vital for educationists to inform debate by providing evidence on the implications for democratic practices, learning, creativity, diversity, social justice, inequalities and so on. The data from these projects is analysed broadly according to a critical realist perspective (Bhaskar, Sayer) focusing on three dimensions of social/educational action: a) conceptual frameworks, b) cultural, social, organisational practices, and c) relevant material structures and resources (Schostak 2002). The data will be discussed in the context of a tradition of child- centred initiatives during the past 100 years. To what extent do the new collaborative open learning environments that are emerging re-create the conditions of these earlier traditions which were so politically castigated in the UK and other countries during the 1980s? What kinds of 'new' (if any) pedagogical, curriculum development and learning strategies need to be developed? What are the implications for cultural diversity and democracy of the new emergent environments? These are the key questions of the paper.