If you are interested in online discussion, discourse based learning, etc. then check out Google Wave if you haven’t done so already.

Just in the process of rewriting the Forum module in Interact and using the dojo framework to add some ajax functionality to the interface.

Despite the rise of blogs, and other forms of asynchronous communication, I think there is still a place for the good old threaded discussion forum, particularly in online learning, but the Interact version is in desperate need of a revamp. Have had a look around for some other forums that have added some ajax to the interface and came up with the following:

http://bbpress.org/
http://www.planetblur.org/beta/
http://getvanilla.com/

I have some ideas about what the perfect forum in a learning context should include:

• Easily identify new threads, posts, or old threads with new posts
• Ability to easily view all posts by a particular learner and see their posting profile
• Wisper function so comments on a particular post can only be viewed by a selected learner
• Easy quoting system for referencing other posts
• Subscription options, email, rss, etc.
• Draft/Published options
• Tagging options
• Bulk downloading of threads into a spreadsheet for more detailed analysis of discussion

to name a few – now just need to get busy coding. If you have any features that you would love to see in a discussion forum let me know!