Stephen Downes

I have been sort of sympathetic to the concept of the learningmanagement operating system (LMOS) because, after all, the concept includes things that I favour: distributed resources, user access to the underlying system. But I began to falter when Michael Feldstein said "We don't just want to offer many different affordances. we want to orchestrate them." And following his link to Bernie Durfee has sketched out a first use case implementation sent me over the edge. I'll say it bluntly, and apologize later: this is the most ridiculous thing I've seen. Durfee is describing what the rest of understand as 'upload a file and base a discussion thread on it'. Something I did right here in about 10 seconds today. But he requires J2EE containers, portlet containers, service integration agents, native Java interfaces, a whole mess of stuff. Ridiculous. Absurd! That's it - if that is what is meant, toast the whole LMOS concept.