[Technical] Using IRC for student development collaboration

[Clark, Ian C]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: tech-bounces at edulists.com.au 
> Sharing code via IRC is easy. Sharing code face-to-face is hard.
> 
> Sharing ideas with 20 kids on IRC is easy. Sharing ideas with 
> 20 kids in a lab is hard. Logging and documenting all the 
> good ideas is exciting and helps the kids understand that 
> they are building something more than a transient app.

Honestly, sharing isn't a problem, Con ... students already do plenty of
that ... too much of it, many would say.  ;-)

They share mp3s, movies and copied homework from each other (you
actually don't want collaboration happening on an assignment that isn't
a team project!). 

Students don't need a peer to peer app to do all this. It already
happens around the State courtesy of USB keys, shared out laptop hard
drives, compromised folders on school servers and burnt CDs/DVDs.

It may not be a problem for you and any contract programmers working
from home, but it's a problem in schools for teachers and network
administrators. 

Imagine a situation where you have twenty five employees, who from 9 to
5, would prefer to socialize and share fun stuff instead of work for
Cybersource. Well, that's a scenario a teacher can face five times a
day.  :-)

Generally, a teacher who wants to make code or a photo or an assignment
available to my class, can put it on an Intranet or a folder on a
server, and examples of student work can go there too. Using IRC to do
that might suit some people really well, but not others. 

A debate between schools by videoconferencing, or streaming between
campuses of a school assembly or staff meeting that also gets archived
for future use, might be uses of a Real Time Communications server that
don't have the same drop-in-productivity implications for the kids.

Cheers,
Clarky




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