Is there life beyond discussion boards?

Dear ADDIE,
I am working on a course with an instructor who wants to have an online class of 10-15 student-teachers brainstorm and create a list of potential social studies field trips. We already will be using the discussion feature quite a bit throughout the course, and I'm having a hard time getting her on board for using any interactivity but discussion. Can you and your readers give me some advice? Should we stick with the familiar structure of the discussion board or venture out to some Web 2.0 technologies that would mean we go beyond the LMS? And if the latter, so do you have any suggestions?
Signed,
Somewhat Discuss-ted

Dear Somewhat,
I hesitate to make a judgment without knowing the experience with online learning that the learners possess.  If they are not comfortable with navigating the Web or this is their first online course, I would lean toward keeping the activity simple and structured. It might be within the discussion board or mean just having students email the teacher. Then she distributes the completed list to the class. It might seem boring to you but this experience might be "new and interesting" to this class. The teacher also might need to time to get be more comfortable with the new technology.

That said, if experience is not the issue then I would highly recommend Google Docs. Once the teacher has an account, students' emails can be added and invited to access the  document. That way students could then add a field trip suggestion to the the list.  See
http://docs.google.com/
Do any of you readers have other thoughts or suggestions for activities?
Best,  
Steve (For ADDIE)