Community building with blogs

What do you think of the sites Jonassen mentions? In what ways could they build community? Do you have experience using any of them -- or maybe any others like them?
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I have used blogs and wikis for community building, both of which are mentioned by Jonassen.

Blogs
We recently experienced a terrible tragedy at one of our schools. 4 students and one teacher were killed in a car accident. The students were from 3 different countries.

As the central information point person for the crisis, I found myself with bits of paper containing critical information all over my desk. I also had to report to several different stakeholders around the world on the current situation several times per day.

I decided to create a blog with all of the critical information everyone needed to know. This consolidated the information in one place, easily accessible from any PC or Blackberry.

This blog served not only to get the same information out to all interested parties, it also allowed us at the school to receive support from afar in supportive posts from our colleagues. It created a feeling of community even with the participants being as far away as Sydney and Hong Kong.

Wikis
I have used wikis to build communities of practice for my staff and teachers. We operate 8 schools in the US and more in the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

Our curriculum is standard across all centers and until recently, teachers in individual centers have worked in isolation. I created a national teachers wiki so teachers in centers around the world can communicate with other teachers teaching the same curriculum. They can share ideas, aks questions of each other and share resources.

I've found that only some teachers are interested in participating. Some see it as yeat another thing they have to do for their jobs. It's interesting that they see it this way as there is no requirement to participate. My expectation was that they would love it and use it but that's been only partially true.