You correctly emphasize that a PLE is not about collecting resources that are relevant to you as a person, almost a content collector, nor is some sort of pedagogy. It is a way of setting up an environment that is conducive to learning. Rightly therefore you say at the end of section 5 that ‘PLEs might be seen instead as a flexible process to scaffold individual and community learning and knowledge development’. I would replace the ‘might’ by a ‘should’, though.

The task now is to work out what in the absence of dedicated teachers and, above all, a fixed instructional design, scaffolding amounts to. And I agree with you, we need technology for that. Without going into details, this is what I have been trying to do too with my group at the OUNL. We experimented with (latent semantic analysis-based) systems for peer support – cf the work by Peter van Rosmalen, http://hdl.handle.net/1820/1267 – and with concept extraction to aid arriving at a shared meaning – cf. work by Adriana Berlanga and others, http://dspace.ou.nl/handle/1820/2961.