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Abstract AOL Instant messenger (IM) was used over four semesters as an additional way for students to contact us during office hours. Since college students primarily use IM as a way to interact socially with their friends and family, we were curious if students would use IM to contact us, who would use it, how often they would use it, and what the content of the IM interactions would be. After two years of collecting all IM exchanges with students, we found that students did use IM to contact us on a regular basis. Both male and female students in roughly equal numbers used IM. In addition, a majority of the exchanges were task related; that is, questions and comments relating to a particular course or assignment. Results, personal reflections, and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Extraordinary edublogger Barbara Sawhill at Oberlin University's language lab in Ohio brings students of Arabic to talk with native speakers in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia using Skype. This triumph over distance only works because Skype's sound quality keeps the high and low tones of sound; telephones and other VoIP software/hardware clip out those parts of speech.

Monday, August 22, 2005 Hello! First of all, thank you very much Buth for listening and aswering all our quetions even though they may not have been for you of an easy issue to talk about. As I couldn't attend the first session, it was my first skype's experience, and I must say that I really enjoyed it. (I have to admit that I was a little bit shy at first). I was really amazed at the many cultural differences between our countries even though I already knew they were really different. It happens that many times we see things about our culture as something so common to us that we can't think of them in a different way or it's difficult for us to imagine people living without them. I believe that the good thing about it, it's trying to get to know another ways of livng and respect them, even they aren't exactly like ours. posted by Laura at 7:28 PM