From a pedagogical perspective the importance of collaborative facilities that support conversational processes has been identified as a generic requirement. From a technical perspective the notion of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides an attractive means of meeting that requirement. More generally a SOA holds out the possibility of dynamically composing learning environments from diverse, distributed, heterogeneous learning resources. The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) provides a suitable basis for exploring the efficacy of this approach. This paper reports on work carried out in the European Learning Grid Infrastructure project to make two established learning facilities, Finesse and BuddySpace, OGSA compliant and interoperable.