Bravo! Excellent excellent excellent...

On a tangent:

If we talk about 'PLEs' for long enough, people will begin to assume they exist - and that there is a particular kind of artifact which 'is a' PLE.

- top man Mikey, this could be straight out of Korzybski's 'General Semantics' (if the PLE meme had been around in the 30s). He's the guy with the original beef against the 'is' of identity.

I also loved the

"Our ignorance of pertinent use-cases is almost complete"

statement - I admire your restraint! It reminded me of Voltaire's "The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity." :o)

Vendors rushing to WebTwoIse(TM) their ghastly monolithic 'VLE' products is the inevitable outcome of the PLE hype. As some sort of counter measure, I agree totally with the need to encourage funding bodies to concentrate on the other aspects (the components and the glue). The vendors will still think it is all about systems rather than tools, and constrained environments rather than loosely-coupled activities, but a concerted effort to educate the funding bodies (and ethical practice on the behalf of the R&D community [i.e. avoiding 'give me £x and I will develop you the ultimate PLE' bids]) just might have a chance to dissuade the punters (e.g. the HE institutions) to stop chucking their money at the crap stuff,

...and - you never know - e-Learning 'courses' might one day be worth the money that some poor saps have to pay for them!