Mailing lists is certainly a possibility. However, be aware that things like IRC channels are outside the scope of the project. The official IRC channel isn't hosted by Wikiversity (well, WMF), so why should the unofficial ones be? People are free to start a channel on freenode as and when they feel like it. As for a live conversation, I might be able to develop a teacher-student classroom real time conversation system. It won't exactly be feature rich, so no whiteboard or learning material library, but it should offer authenticated teachers ability to upload learning materials and manage the conversation, and it serves the purpose. We could even host it on toolserver. I've got clearance for a toolserver account, but being on leave (officially and unofficially) I haven't bothered to set it up yet. Any suggestions?
On 11/20/06, Teemu Leinonen teemu.leinonen@uiah.fi wrote:
Hi all,
Have you discussed about the possibility to host mailing lists, IRC channels and VoIP conference calls for the study courses using Wikiversity?
This way the teachers could actually have a class in the Wikiversity. These collaboration services would bring Wikiversity to new level: not to be a repository of self-study materials, but hmm... University (community) ran on Wiki :-)
I wrote sometime ago about the community and social aspects of Wikiversity in here:
http://flosse.dicole.org/?item=wikiversity-time-to-vote
Best regards,
- Teemu
Teemu Leinonen http://www.uiah.fi/~tleinone/ +358 50 351 6796 Media Lab http://mlab.uiah.fi University of Art and Design Helsinki
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