Hi Scott,
In December I had never seen a Wiki. My students and I jumped in with both feet and haven't looked back. The students are very excited to have a real audience. Please take a look at what they've created so far. RPG Maker XP Help. We would appreciate any feedback you have. Currently the wiki is protected, so you'll have to either email me your feedback or give it through Classroom 2.0.
Thanks!
Pat

Hi Scott,

We're reaching out to folks in education one at a time. I saw your recent discussion about blogs and wikis in the classroom, and so I thought this might interest you.

We've developed a tool for organizing conversations inside federal agencies and we've just now started opening it up to the educational world. The tool is called DeepDebate and the purpose of the tool is to make online conversations easy, fun, and efficient through the use of conversation mapping.

The strength of the software is that it challenges students to think before they write. It also can handle many simultaneous participants in ways that wikis cannot. It's not meant to replace wikis, but it is meant to be a pre-consensus tool that a group of people use to list all their ideas on each side of an issue.

Here's what teachers had to say in a recent pilot project in Pennsylvania. Students also particularly like the partial anonymity the tool provides (teachers still know who is writing what).

We're looking to offer our services for free to individual teachers so that we can raise the profile of our software. If you feel this could be useful to you please drop me a note at lucas[at]deepdebate.org and we'd be happy to support any innovative ideas you have!

Lucas

Great avatar, Scott. I recognized you right off the bat.