Jon Udell gets it 100% right:
“Thanks to the philosophical foundations of the Internet — open standards, collaborative design, layered architecture — its technologies typically qualify as user innovation toolkits. That wasn’t true, though, for the Internet era’s first wave of educational technologies. That’s why my friends in that field led a rebellion against learning management systems and sought out their own innovation toolkits: BlueHost, del.icio.us, MediaWiki, WordPress.
My hunch is that those instincts will serve them well in the MOOC era. Educational technologists who thrive will do so by adroitly blending local culture with the global platforms. They’ll package their own offerings for reuse, they’ll find ways to compose hybrid services powered by a diverse mix of human and digital resources, and they’ll route around damage that blocks these outcomes.
These values, skills, and attitudes will help keep a diverse population of universities alive. And to the extent students at those universities absorb them, they’ll be among the most useful lessons learned there.”
What I like best about the post is what a hopeful message it brings. You can see the recent rise of the xMOOC/neo-LMS as a giant step back (and I have at times felt that way). Conversely, you can see it as creating exactly the sort of problems we’ve spent the last decade building toolkits to solve.
We were built, my esteemed peeps, for precisely this moment. That’s not such a bad thing at all.
Hapgood 
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