What on earth are we up to?

These are our themes:

Digital technology is no longer exceptional. Learners bring their own computing, and their established social networking platforms into higher education. As well as calling the "institutional portal" and the VLE as we know them into question, it provides a great pedagogic opportunity to harness extra-institutional communities of practice into a wider, and more relevant, teaching and learning experience.
The portal and the VLE are dead? Sure, there's something alive in the wreckage. Some learning content is at home in the VLE. And institutional resources should be discoverable. There is a value in the classroom as a psychological space that tolerates questions and failure.
Integrating institutional functionality into commercial social software requires an approach based on radical simplicity. We thing RSS, the Atom Publishing Protocol, and various microformats are "good enough" to enable institutional systems to "plug into" social networking.
This benefits practitioners as much as learners. Though we haven't quite got to the bottom of thinking through the PIE (personal instructional environment), we hope to get there soon.