IRC - Internet Relay Chat
I have started using Internet Relay Chat (IRC) as a place to hold
online office hours or just to answer student questions. IRC is
a relatively simple, relatively lightweight, public chat program.
You can find me in the channel grinnell-cs on the
freenode.net IRC server.
Why am I asking you to use IRC? I have a few reasons:
-
I consider it important that you learn tools that people use in
the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community. IRC is
one such tool. (See below for why FOSS projects use IRC.
-
I want to encourage you to be public with your work. (Yes, I
know that this is in contrast to many faculty.) Using IRC
asks you to be public with your questions.
-
I hope that Grinnell CS students can form a community in which
students (and perhaps alums) help each other, even if they are
not in the same space or the same class.
-
We can keep a log of our IRC chats, so questions that are answered
once need not be answered multiple times.
I've also heard good things about the use of IRC from a valued
colleague at another institution, and I want to see if his experiences
translate well to Grinnell.
IRC and Free and Open Source Communities
A large number of FOSS communities use IRC, often in multiple ways.
(The two most common ways are scheduled meetings and just being
available for questions or discussion.) Why use IRC? My sense is
that two main principals dictate its use: IRC is open and and
egalitarian.
FOSS folks really seem to believe in working in the open - being
willing to reveal the mess behind the scenes in software. They
make incomplete work available (which I will admit is hard for someone
like me, who is too often a perfectionist in his software). Doing
so not only makes it easier for people to see what's happening, it
may make it easier for others to join in. And being open makes it
possible for anyone to join in.
How is IRC egalitarian? It's simple and low bandwidth, which makes it
available to a wider variety of people. You can use IRC on a computer
that's more than a decade old, running an old OS. You can use IRC on
a smart phone (although I wouldn't recommend it). But the use of text
is also egalitarian - if English isn't your native language (or
whatever language is being used for the chat), you can copy and paste
into a translator, such as Google translate, and usually get a better
sense of the conversation.
I'd be interested in hearing your own thoughts on why IRC is or is not
a good technology for communicating.
