Yes it does feel as though we're having a continuing chat, sometimes in person, sometimes in forums like this. Thanks Ken - a great initiative. I like the Leatherman analogy - the thing is in certain circumstances a Leatherman is a highly useful thing. What is happening now though is that with protocols like XML-RPC, SOAP and the like is that the tools in the toolkit are getting more loosely coupled. Mahara has been built to be pluggable. Drupal and Moodle are other examples of these evolving architectures and they're getting better and more flexible all the time. A terrible acronym it makes but I see LMSs like Moodle evolving to a Learning Operating System with a kernel of pluggable and highly useful tools. It's already a long way there which is why I get frustrated when folk bang on about SOA as though you have to scrap everything that exists and start afresh.
I take your point about wikis in themselves being about self-organising communities. MySpace is also selforganising within the bounds of the software application it is built on. A wiki is built on wiki technologies and I still think there's a way to go here with many variants on wikitext - there's no commonly accepted standard wikitext language - grammar, structure, features, keywords and so on are dependent on the particular wiki software used and is a language that users have to adapt to. Transformations (e.g. to clean XHTML) are not yet straight forward with many wiki technologies. I'm sure this will all happen and is not far away. Wikis are indeed a very exciting part of the landscape. RSS is also an underutilised technology in educational contexts.
Cheers
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