Thanks for linking to this — Alex Halavais created a wiki where EVERYONE could join in the roundtable, so be sure to put in your 2 cents at http://alex.halavais.net/files/OjrRemix .
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If you have about five hours with nothing to do, head on over to Slashdot and check out this thread on the value of computers in the classroom. It stems from a review of Todd Oppenheimer’s The Flickering Mind, which, from everything I’ve heard, deals a stinging blow to the whole technology in the classroom model. The stories of success and failure go back and forth, and the debate is as passionate as they come. But one theme that seems to run through most is that teachers are just not prepared to make good use of the technology they have. Now, that is not an indictment of teachers as much as it is one of the system that trains them. Personally, obviously, I think technology plays a crucial role in the classroom but only when the teachers using it have attained a fluency that allows them to be creative with its implementation.

And the great thing about Weblogs and wikis and the rest is that fluency is relatively easy. You don’t need hours and hours of training to see the potential of this. I know we have a long way to go with multimedia and handhelds and the like, but provided they have the access, this is something we can do now. And I think if more people could engage their children and their teachers via the transparency that the technology provides, maybe people will be able to recognize the benefits more easily.

I just realized I never got around to adding this often linked article at the Online Journalism Review which is really an interview with Dr. Kaye Trammel, Alex Halavais, Jill Walker and Cori Dauber.

Are Weblogs a passing fad or a revolutionary new form of communication and publishing? That’s still an open question, but the presence of blogs in the academic environment makes it more likely that they’ll survive and thrive in the long term. Educational types aren’t just using blogs to teach or spread their research. They are turning their research lens on Weblogs themselves, whether the context is within schools of law, journalism, communication or library science.

Note: Kaye sent along this link to a wiki page for further discussion.
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Interesting, in light of our recent discussions, that Frontier, the server software that Manila runs on, will be released as open source. Dave Winer says:

And that’s what I want to announce today. At some point in the next few months, there will be an open source release of the Frontier kernel. Not sure what license it’ll use. There won’t be any grand expectations of what kind of community will develop. Even if no bugs get fixed, if no features get added, if no new OSes are supported, it will be worth it, because its future will be assured. That’s the point Ted makes, and that’s my reasoning behind this.

Since I’m pretty clueless about the code, how about some help in terms of what this means for Manila users…especially the “future is assured” part.