Over the last two years, Wikis have proved to be an effective new teaching tool in Wits Digital Arts. Tegan Bristow, who introduced them into her classes, has been using them for as open online platforms for collecting lab assignments and making a range of information easily available to her students. I haven’t seen much evidence that people are editing each other’s work; but the wiki format does allow a accumulation of ideas and work across years.  This is particularly important in Lab classes where  programming libraries can be built up over time.  Nevertheless, the LISTSERV,  although almost 30 years old, remains a vital tool for teaching or any kind of collective intellectual effort. As Farhad Manjoo argues in his impassioned defence of the LISTSERV in the age of Web 2.0:
They are just about the only medium online devoted exclusively to discussing things. You start a Facebook group to popularize an idea (1 million people against hipsters!), you start a Tumblr to make fun of the idea (Look at This Fucking Hipster), and you start a Twitter account to get a lot of people interested in your pithy observations about the idea. E-mail lists, by contrast, are devoted to getting people to talk about an idea.

In fact Manjoo is so enthusiastic about LISTSERVs that he asks all his readers to email him the name and topic of their favourite mailing lists so that he can promote them more widely.