Stowe recently got an email that he forwarded to me, from someone asking "how instant messaging can be used within an educational context" and wanting to know who was working on this.

I figure the core of my quickly-generated reply would be of interest to Get Real readers, so here it is, with clickable links left 'spelled out' in full for ease of reference:

"Without having any background context or knowing more about what your interest is, what you're working on, and what relevant literature you've already read, I'll respond with a few choice references [in a nutshell, there is LOTS going on in this area]:"

1. "Instant Messaging – Collaborative Tool or Educator’s nightmare!" by Robert Farmer, Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada at

http://naweb.unb.ca/proceedings/2003/PaperFarmer.html
(quick overview and many links to other sources)

2. "Wireless Presence and Instant Messaging" [report for UK government, written by Yanna Vogiazou, one of my PhD students], with links to full Word/PDF doc here:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=techwatch_report_0207
(the above then contains many 'onward' references)

3. Then there's a forthcoming paper from my own group at The Knowledge Media Institute, to appear in the 2005 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, entitled "From Buddyspace to CitiTag: Large-scale Symbolic Presence for Community Building and Spontaneous Play". The paper talks in section 3 about what we're doing with Instant Messaging at The UK's Open University (200K distance learning students annually, arguably 'The Mother Of All Virtual Universities'):

http://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/index.cfm?trnumber=kmi-04-25
(with onward links to the full PDF file)

4. Millions of students use IM (I mean 'millions' literally)... some officially, many unofficially... here's an old (2001) but still-active link to an official use by the University of Wisconsin, which licensed the Jabber platform for 80,000 students, and may give you some leads regarding followup enquiries with Wisconsin:
http://www.instantmessagingplanet.com/enterprise/article.php/909741

5. Four random other references from one of my papers:

Nardi, B.A., Whittaker, S., Isaacs, E., Creech, M., Johnson, J., and Hainsworth, J. Integrating communication and information through ContactMap. Communications of the ACM 45:4, pp. 89-95, April, 2002.

Rossade, K-D. “Audio-graphic-conferencing and Instant Messaging in language learning.” Proceedings of the 8th biennial conference of the International Association for Language Learning Technology, June 17-21, 2003, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.

Scott, P., and Eisenstadt, M. Exploring telepresence on the Internet: the KMi Stadium Webcast experience. In Eisenstadt, M. and Vincent, T. (Eds.), The Knowledge Web: Learning and Collaborating On The Net. London: Kogan Page, 1998.

Whitelock, D., Romano, D.M., Jelfs, A., and Brna, P. Perfect Presence: What does this mean for the design of virtual learning environments? Education and Information Technologies, 5:4, pp277-289, 2000.