Looks like it could be a core for a PLE.

TB-L is back with his continuing arguments for an open, net neural web. "Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium. It brings principles established in the U.S. Constitution, the British Magna Carta and other important documents into the network age: freedom from being snooped on, filtered, censored and disconnected."

via Tech-Rhet. Bar charts. Online is more work for less educational quality, and practiced mainly by the tenure-track faculty. I'm assuming this refers mainly to institutionalized CMS stuff. That's my over-generalization for the day.

Go, Stephen: "While a great deal of virtual ink has been spilled over the need to reform our schools and universities, I think we need to question how we manage education altogether. For it is manifest that the institution, the form in which we have managed education and society in general, has ultimately come to failure." This article is difficult to summarize, but it places institutionalized ed in there with corporate greed, exploitation, outsourcing, and powerlessness. And my university says, "Education is broken because we don't assess." Ed is broken alright, but it's broken like corporations are.

Brief model of a Siemens's PLE and workflow analysis.

A curated cluster media commons, considering how we take notes - the devices and the technques. #1 on my Instapaper list right now: That's a case where the note is the content. 

Mother of all PLE diagrams compilation

Good intro and o review of MOOCs and open ed in general: movement towards the Socratic and away from content-centered.