This is substantially the same article as one that was posted earlier and about which there has been a fair bit of commentary (e.g. from Tony Bates, Michael Feldstein, Stephen Downes, and me) but now in the EDUCAUSE Review.

Though all of us who have commented have criticisms of some of the details, and we have some observations to make about the fact that this hat is pretty old (and makes some of the mistakes of its predecessors), all are agreed that the basic ideas behind  this initiative, as well as its explicit critique of the traditional LMS and vision of its future roles,  are fundamentally sound. This is not too surprising as it results from the inputs of a very large number of experts in the field and is not too far from being a consensus view.

In brief, this is roughly what a successor to an LMS should look like.

I don't agree with its emphasis on personalization (it should be personal, only part of which might optionally be provided by personalization), though I do agree that the hooks should be there to use for such purposes. I think it should, in accordance with its own goals, have more focus on the learner and how people learn, rather than institutions and technology. I think the name is awful: the 'next-generation' part is unnecessary hype, 'digital' is superfluous, and it is not an environment, as such, inasmuch as 'environment' implies a specific contiguous space (it is not a platform either - it is a combination of them). What it describes is in fact an ecosystem with stronger and weaker dynamic connections between its assemblable and disassemblable parts, that may be pulled together into any number of different environments by any number of stakeholders.

I think it is going to be really hard pushing against vested commercial interests like Blackboard and Pearson who are not going to take it lying down and will probably try to kill it like they have all other similar attempts in the past, while duplicitously pretending to embrace the open standards. But it is definitely the right direction to be heading.