"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."
There are different sets of tools involved and it may be better to develop environments which allow flexible access to different tool sets for different purposes.
How are blogfolios different from e-Portfolios? They aren't exactly, they're more of a subset of e-Portfolios, or another way of looking at the traditional e-Portfolio.