I'm still waiting to see the example that fully demonstrates its potential, but I think CommentPress (a very slick WordPress theme/hack from The Future of the Book) is going to end up being absolutely killer in higher education. Jim Groom blogged on its affordances some time ago, describing it as a "revolutionary nested comment functionality that re-imagines the space wherein you can have threaded conversations alongside the text to brilliantly capture the actual unfolding of a stream of textual ideas in-line."
Now, Alan Levine of the NMC, who used CommentPress to great effect on the Evolution of Communication whitepaper brings joyous tidings that WordPress Multi-User is now able to support the theme. We have been making rapid process on our own WordPress hosting service lately, and I can now confidently announce we are moving up the date of launch to late June, 2012.
And since I consume Grand Text Auto in my RSS newsreader, I had no idea they were already there... I shouldn't be surprised.