Serious chat in a university setting

[Prentiss Riddle]

I'm sure this is a frequently asked question, but I haven't found a FAQ
that encapsulates a satisfactory answer.  (Pardon the crossposting to
UWEBDB and Web4Lib.)

I'm investigating online chat with the possibility of supporting it
here at Rice.  The history is that we have never supported chat before
because of a lack of faculty interest, because the models we'd seen
were all recreational in nature, and because known chat implementations
(IRC, MUDs) were resource-intensive and/or insecure.  Now we have some
faculty interest and it's time to revisit the issue.

So my question comes in two parts:

  (1) Do you know of examples of chat being used for serious
      instructional, scholarly or administrative work in a university
      setting?  Where, and how?

  (2) Do you have recommendations of specific chat software?


As a partial answer to (2), I'll mention a few resources I've found:

  PCMag article on chat software
  http://www8.zdnet.com/pcmag/features/chatserver/_open.htm

  Yahoo lists of chat software and web chat software
  http://www.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Companies/Computers/Software/Internet/Chat/
  http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Chat/Software/

I've started a cursory review of ichat Rooms (www.ichat.com) and Volano
Chat (www.volano.com).  ichat is more powerful but more complicated and
much more expensive; Volano is a very simple chat implementation in
Java but may not do everything one wants for a particular application.


Feel free to reply to the lists if your answer would be of general
interest.  Thanks.

-- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle at rice.edu
-- Webmaster, Rice University / http://is.rice.edu/~riddle
-- Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer.