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Talkwheel’s design makes class conversations easier to follow, more interactive, and more effectively organized. It eliminates the problem of navigating multithreaded conversations, enables real-time group conversation, and makes referencing asynchronous conversations much easier. Talkwheel’s dashboard organization allows teachers to organize all their classes and projects in one centralized location, while Talkwheel's analytics helps teachers and administrators quantitatively monitor their students’ progress throughout the year.

Quora is a Q&A site nicely integrated with Facebook that has done a good job providing a means to ask questions and get answers.

Quora has been able to form quite an elite network of VCs, entrepreneurs, and other experts to answer questions.  They've also created topic pages such as: Learning Management System. 

Finally, Namesake, is a tool for real-time and asynchronous conversations.  It's a bit like Quora but more focused on conversation as compared to Q&A and it allows real-time conversation a bit like twitter.  You can see an example of a conversation around phones below.

All of these point to new types of conversation models that are emerging in tools.

it's also about sharing with the right people. Circles will allow what educational consultant Tom Barnett calls "targeted sharing," something that will be great for specific classes and topics

Skype has become an incredibly popular tool to bring in guests to a classroom via video chat -

teachers are already talking about the possibility of not just face-to-face video conversation but the potential for integration of whiteboards, screen-sharing, Google Docs, and other collaborative tools

Google + seems like the solution for someone like me who wants to use the web to have conversations about school topics with students and parents and yet not have students and parents have access to my personal posts.