Ken Udas' post What do we do with Non Courseware as OERs reminds me of two things 1) work in the eportfolio area 2) a concept that I've been bouncing around with people lately.
First, development of ePortfolios with social networking capability is an attempt to address the reflective learning and non-formal learning potential in educational settings. We've been heavily involved in the development of Mahara which is partly inspired by the work that the Elgg team have achieved.
The second thing that Ken's post triggered is an idea about taking OERs and social constructivism into a new form of LMS construct. Courses and cohorts of students facilitated by knowledgeable, experienced academics is so useful that this paradigm will remain as the primary form in education. However, within that imagine a course where content is constantly dynamic and created through participation as well as external feeds etc. The easiest way to understand this at present is through the use of a wiki, although this technology has some way to go to replace the current norm of LMSs.
How might this look? A student enrols in a course, views the materials but may also change them as part of their course involvement. Students also add feeds, delete feeds, vote posts up, add comments to others' posts etc. The idea is that the courseware is thereby constantly evolving and fit for purpose when the new cohort enters the course. In addition, modules of courseware can get reused in different conetxs. e.g My login to a wiki triggers different activities, quizzes and access to discussions that does yours because I'm enrolled ina different course. There's QA considerations but at a technical level this isn't that challenging with current tools available.
