I wonder if there is anyway of providing the functionality of a site like
http://www.japan-guide.com/penfriend/index_e.php
My current attempt at social constructivism (?) takes the form of encouraging my students to make friends abroad. I give them lessons in the techniques for mainting these relationships (mainly 'ask questions' and 'use links to liven up mail'). I find that it is a good way of getting some (but only some) of my students to take an avid intested in using English, and from my own experience it can be a great way to learn.
The above form of site, basically a sort of "singles site" has dangers though, which is why it would be better to have some sort of penpal pool, or borderless-multi-moodle forum, activity module between moodlers and our students.
To make this happen, I am thinking of some kind of client to client, pinging, RSS feeding technology like the Trackback function Movable Type uses for interation between blogs. http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/beginners/
They also offer a standalone version in Perl
http://www.movabletype.org/docs/tb-standalone.html
I have not got this going on my blog, so I have no idea how it would be done but, if all those people using Moodle for, say, English language teaching could somehow set one of their forums (or glossary of people?) to have interconectivity with other forums elsewhere, then this would allow student to student communication accross borders. And that would really be making the most of this media for language learning in (for me) a social constructivist way.
I guess that we could start this by giving guest access to each other's sites, were it not for the fact that guests cannot post, and my site is IMAPped to prevent non-University students from using it, for the time being.
But anyway, I am thinking about a distributed system and not just setting up penpal forum on some one Moodle site, since I don't think that would work. Either it would be too busy or not busy enough. And decentered is good.
The tracback could be used for other things of course, but a decentered distribution of people that want to communicate is the first use that I would have for it.
Just an idea.