David is teasing his readers in today's issue of Serious Instructional Technology

Duncan, don't suppose you know of any applications that integrate e-mail and web site management do you? B-)

Not entirely without coincidence Seth chips in too:

I'm trying to find more educators to work with in developing Conversant - based course-support sites. We had one extremely successful site this summer that generated over 1000 messages in just a few weeks, partially because the students could participate however they wanted (and partially because the teacher was good at getting the students involved, among other reasons).

Seth, I'm very interested in setting up a Conversant site along the lines of [Friday] Crusoe's Companion Website! from last academic year. That site generated over 600 messages in a similar timescale with over 100 contributors so I'm delighted to hear that Conversant has handled a similar load.

I have also to confess that I haven't explicitly told the membership of Duncan's Jotter that they can participate in the discussions and posts via e-mail (SMTP) and news (NNTP) protocols in addition to the web (HTTP) interface. Would anyone be interested in hearing about this? ;-)

Incidentally, the main reason I use newsgroups to support my teaching is that it's more convenient than continually updating web pages on a static site. <tongue align='cheek'>A dynamic site with web, e-mail, and news interfaces, message threading and searching capabilities would be my idea of computer-mediated teaching nirvana!!</tongue>

Duncan