Dave, thanks for the list of links. I'm going to try to find some time to look into at least some of them; I hope others on this thread will do the same, in addition to looking at Talli's suggestion of Movable Type.
On the issue of referral logs vs. discussion threads, they both seem useful in an educational context. If, for example, you want to have students primarily focus on journaling and occasionally cross-pollenating as they see fit, then referral logs is definitely the way to go because it doesn't force excessive structure on the conversation. On the other hand, if you *want* a structured conversation where students have a conversations which are triggered by the initial thought of a particular person (either a student who is journaling or an instructor), then threads are the best. So in an ideal world an instructor would have the ability to choose which mechanism is best suited to the instructional goals at hand.
Note, by the way, that the referral mechanism could be useful in a conventional bboard app to make connections between threads easier.
