e-Literate: Stephen Downes Missed the Point

e-Literate: Stephen Downes Missed the Point has some very good discussion on VLE/LMS architecture/development/direction. It seems to have some parrallels with the questions I have regarding the project Tetra. And what do I think? I'm very skeptical about this idea that we are close to a framework where we can take tools from different places and plug them together. If the tools are written against an existing product that defines the layers and APIs then everything works (like plugins for Firefox), but we are trying to get Firefox plugins to work in IE. For me the biggest problem in the VLE world is dealing with authentication and authorization which is often ignored by other web applications as they don't have materials that they need to restrict access to. Eg, Amazon doesn't have some books that only some people can see, so it's web APIs can be simple. In the VLE most of the current material is restricted and authorization checks have to be peformed.