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Whether you’re a teacher, administrator or knowledge worker, keeping track of your assignments, tasks and documents is a universal need. Software companies have provided these solutions for secondary and higher education as they do for the enterprise. But when it comes to social collaboration, education lags behind. Enter Rizzoma. They recently introduced a new product, Rizzoma Live Wiki, that aims to revolutionize group communication and real time collaboration for the academic set.

Social Collaboration -- It's Academic 

You can argue that when it comes to being social, educators are excluded from the equation. They don’t socialize, they teach and it’s an insult to think otherwise. However, try as they might to fight off the social trend, many academics have found that even they are not immune to social media and have begun to embrace key elements. Social collaboration for one has proven useful.

When Google Wave was first released, its most passionate users were educators, who really enjoyed being able to contextually live edit within a single communiqué. Google Wave aimed to be the digital equivalent of a blank white board, but in the end was phased out.

Now Rizzoma's Live Wiki tries to pick up where Google Wave left off by allowing users to collaborate using online communication while being able to have all your documents in one place, simultaneously edit and structure conversations linearly. 

The video below does a good job explaining how projects can be created and how collaborators can be added from Facebook or Google contacts.  

Using the characters at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital (PPTH), Rizzoma illustrates how the new wiki can be used to facilitate tasks across devices. 

Outside the Enterprise, But Wanting to Stay Linked In

Overall, Rizzoma Live Wiki takes all the popular and useful elements of social media and puts them to use in a collaborative platform. What Yammer can do for the enterprise, Live Wiki can do for academics and then some. While it helps to keep everyone on the same page, the opportunity for other e-learning initiatives are boundless. Team members at a Swedish research institute, for example, used Rizzoma to facilitate course evaluations, as well as to replace email conversations.

For those outside the traditional enterprise organization but with similar needs for online collaboration, Rizzoma provides a free, open source platform from which to share, edit and learn.