Dojo group http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-dojo has setup an incredible system online to provide - Lessons, Help desk or another online service - to a group or team (10-20 participants). The environment with two basic channel of communication is actually used weekly for a public presentation by the host of the session or teacher. The sessions are announced previously, publishing also the schematic agenda of the session, in the forum of the group – normally Sunday at 20:00CET.
The participants – the students- have to open an IRC session to watch the blackboard – the screen of the teacher – in the left and a typical chat in the column of the right. A second skypecast session is opened to listening the host explanations – or the music in the awaiting time.
https://skypecasts.skype.com/skypecasts/
This open discussion provide speed up the feedbacks and promote the participation. This process start discussing the issue of the lesson, the preparation of the agenda, the presentation of the participants and finally the sessions ending with a question and answers turn.
This is exactly what the the groupware group needs to implement as module or integrated application in addition to the rest of Drupal features for accomplish all the egroupware needs as Collaboative/Cooperative Working Environment.
I hope that the Dojo guys will be so kind and collaborative with the rest of Drupal community, for sharing their knowledge to support the installation of other IRC server and the VNC clients.
http://www.tightvnc.com/download.html
The first feedback of our webhost is that VNC only work in a individual powerful webserver!! Which are the applications that is needed to install in the server and in the client (the teacher PC). It can be used by different groups? Are Skype communication so width to run with all the IRC sessions? What additional features can be install in order to improve the feedback of the participants?
Well this and other question are now opened to be discussed and transferred to the collaborative community of open-source software development. This can be one of the key trails to evaluate the quality of the Drupal community.