Stephen Downes

I'm looking forward more to the latter two parts of this three-part series in which Terry Anderson "explores the learning management system (LMS), social media, and personal learning environments – and how they might best be used for enhanced teaching and learning" but as only the first part is available today we'll have to settle for that. Anderson offers a brisk overview of the LMS and then examines the challenges: "as the number of features increases, so does the complexity and challenges of easy adoption," he writes, while " perhaps the greatest challenge is the inherent 'school focus' of the LMS." We don't really get to the promise of this article - how to get the most out of an LMS - but perhaps what that means is using social media or personal learning environments instead.