Splicing information and social relations to suite the needs of different situations is increasingly important. The fields of learning and development have not yet been transformed to the online environment. The combination of learning/knowledge analytics, data visualization, and activity streams provide, I think, a sufficient basis for educators to begin planning for a post-course view of education.
Schoology is a startup that seeks to address many of the pain points of the LMS: Schoology is easy to use. It's free. It offers data portability. It encourages communication and collaboration with look and feel of contemporary social networking sites rather than the bulletin boards of circa 1996. But it isn't simply a social networking tool. Schoology provides the functionality of its big name competitors - Blackboard, Moodle.
The recently released ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology gives some excellent insights into trends in college students' technology ownership, perceptions, skills, and habits.
The “thin portfolio” concept (borrowing from the prior “personal information aggregation and distribution service” concept) represents the idea that you don’t need that portfolio information in one server; but that it is very helpful to have one place where one can access all “your” information, and set permissions for others to view it. This concept is only beginning to be implemented.