"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."
G. Attwell. Service Oriented Approaches and Lifelong Competence Development Infrastructures: Proceedings of the 2nd TENCompetence Open Workshop, page 36-41. Bolton, UK, Institute of Educational Cybernetics, (2007)