Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 
Trans-dimensional Knowledge Forum!
I’ve spoken before about the two archetypes of Internet-based distance education: asynchronous (typically using message boards, email, etc., and allowing participants to contribute at times of their convenience) and synchronous (text or video chat, immersive environments, etc., which permit instantaneous communication and feedback, but require participants to adhere to a common meeting schedule like a traditional classroom). My interest is mainly in the latter, but there are awfully neat asynchronous environments being designed at OISE and elsewhere to plumb the affordances of time-independent communication, such as deep organization, refinement, and archival of ideas while the communities involved collaborate to build knowledge. We’ll be talking with Stian and Marlene Scardamalia at my research meeting in an hour or so about Knowledge Forum, which you can learn about quickly with Stian’s video, below.
A Demonstration of Knowledge Forum (v2) from Stian Haklev on Vimeo.
Stian mentions a common problem with information overload when approaching a typical threaded conversation on a forum; this is something I experienced acutely during my two online courses, and it’s exciting to see the idea-map style of Knowledge Forum work to address this. However, when a space in KF is mature, it can seem at least as impenetrable as the index for a huge threaded conversation. I hope to raise the following point today to address this: