Using Usenet Newsgroups for Class Purposes?

grape jelly asks: "One of my jobs this summer is to help out the chemistry (eek) department figure out how to best introduce and use the newsgroups with the intro courses. A little work has been done by a couple professors here, however, it mostly has been unsuccessful. After surfing the 'Net looking for what people have already done, I have come to the conclusion that most professors either don't use a course newsgroup or haven't really published any of their results. Does anyone out there have any suggestions as to what we could do to solve some of our problems? (Primarily motivating the students to learn to use the course newsgroup, then making sure they use it throughout the semester) Any specific experience from students (or professors, especially) would be very desirable." (Read on...)

While a nice idea, I think educators would be better off using web-based discussion boards for their classes. Discussions can be presented without the limitations of plain text(HTML is useful for something you know), and everyone can use a browser, whereas this isn't necessarily true for newsreaders. However, if educators have a working communications system between themselves and their students and they are using newsgroups to do it, then more power to 'em!

Comments

Web-based?

[legoboy]

I absolutely hate web-based discussion forums. I deal with it here on Slashdot, but there is no way that anyone is going to convince me that it is easier to communicate on one of these than in a newsgroup.

No one-keypress shortcuts for next message, next unread message, kill thread, etc... Keyword filters are non-existent, the ability to killfile a user is VERY rare.

On a private, passworded (or not) newsserver that doesn't propagate, the email addresses are not harvested, you can keep as long an archive as you like, and you can use whichever newsreader that you like. There isn't anywhere near such diversity and customisability in web browsers.

I don't believe that newsgroups are the climax of communication, but they're just as good as mailing lists, and a far sight better than web-based forums. It's similar to IRC versus the java-based chat that you can find on many websites.

Why reinvent the square wheel?

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Course Newsgroups

[DanMcS]

The computer science department at my school has its own server, and groups for every course. Generally, they are used by students looking for help from one another, though I know the profs and graders monitor them too. Occasionally lab and homework corrections are posted, or notices of due date changes. This is for the comp sci people though, who are expected to be technically competant. For an intro level chem course, it may not be worth the hassle at all; professors would probably be better served by maintaining their own course webpage, or having a TA do it.