"We often talk about games, simulations and other events in learning, but these technologies support only episodic learning. Equally important are those technologies that provide a context for these learning episodes, an environment where students interact and converse among themselves. This paper describes experimentation in the development of distributed online courses and in software - particularly, the personal learning environment - that support the formation of connections between the far-flung pieces of such courses."
Mike Malloch argues that groupwise tagging for semantic content is a key research problem, because it does not work well currently, and for social software that is the primary way in which the program can learn about the user/learner's understanding.