Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

A popular means to chat is through Internet Relay Chat, or just "IRC" to those who use it frequently. On IRC, several persons can simultaneously participate in a discussion over a particular 'channel', or even multiple channels. There is no restriction to the number of people in a given discussion, nor to the number of channels that can be formed. There are IRC users in 60 countries, and it can serve as an inexpensive substitute for long distance telephone conversations.

Appropriateness of Material in Chat Groups

Teachers are warned that IRC chat groups often are free-wheeling, and can easily stray into topics that may not be appropriate for young children. In addition to this concern, one may question the educational value of most Internet chat, which is often oriented more toward recreation and "killing time" than toward material of educational value.

Two alternatives to full IRC chat may help with these difficulties: (1) We discuss below a restricted chat group, KidLink IRC, that requires registration and is oriented toward children 10-15 years old. (2) We discuss in the next section how you can maintain your own chat group on a local server.

Real-Time Chat

IRC conversations take place in "real time", making it particularly useful for live coverage of world events, especially in times of crisis when standard communications channels may be hindered. Three events for which IRC provided a lively forum for exchange of timely information were K-12 teachers may wish to consider IRC chat as a valuable real-time source of classroom information in such periods.

IRC Resources

We do not intend to give a detailed introduction to IRC, but in this section we list a set of resources that will provide more than enough information to get you started in Internet Relay Chat:
  1. IRC FAQ

  2. IRC Manual

  3. HTML FAQ for IRC

  4. A Short IRC Primer (plain text version). There is also a compressed Postscript version, which is in much nicer format than the plain text version if you can handle the Unix-compressed Postscript file. (The newer commercial versions of Stuffit have plugins to uncompress Unix-compressed files; the shareware program DropOff*PS will print Postscript files if your printer is Postscript compatible---see archiving and compression and configuring your system.)

  5. An Index of IRC Networks that includes a short description of each IRC, lists of servers, telnet connections, and available links to specific information.

  6. KidLink IRC: oriented to children 10-15. Requires specific registration to use; registration on-line at the preceding address, and KidLink IRC documentation is available at this gopher address.

  7. You will need an IRC client program for your computer to access IRC servers. A shareware Macintosh IRC client,Ircle, is available from http://www.xs4all.nl/~ircle/.
The details of participating in IRC groups are in many respects similar to those for the chat program that we shall discuss in the next section. For example, many of the commands are similar to the ones we will discuss there.

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