Using Usenet Newsgroups for Class Purposes? 18
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!
Use WebCT (Score:1)
Online quizzes, testing, chat, and webforums...
(www.webct.com)
If all you want is private/public newsgroups, though, use Lyris (www.lyris.com). It's a mailing list manager that can work via email, a WWW interface or an NNTP interface. Pretty slick. One word of caution though: HEED THEIR MEMORY REQUIREMENTS RELIGIOUSLY. When they say it requires 256M RAM on the server, they MEAN it!
Re:Web-based? (Score:1)
I can't stand the current state of web-based discussion. The only way I can manage to follow a thread on Slashdot is by watching the Replies: counters on my user page. The constant need to click back and forth and wait for each new page to be fetched, rendered, and displayed is agonizing, especially when you're (as I am) stuck with a school that mostly does 28.8 dialups.
motivation (Score:1)
That means, NO announcments in class AT ALL.
As long as you tell the students that they are expected to read the NG regularly, then there is nobody to blame their laziness/ignorance on but themselves.
For example.
Prof: "Class put your notes/books away, to take the quiz."
Students: "Oh shit, what quiz?"
Prof: "The quiz that we announced 3 times over the past 3 weeks on the Newsgroups"
Students: "Newsgroup, um... uh..."
after that, I guarantee you all the students will at least attempt to read the newsgroup.
besides class discussion, make sure to provide useful information for the students, like updated grades that are posted weekly, or something like that.
News vs. Web-Based Systems (Score:1)
- Java/Javascript problems: I always end up using both Netscape (4.7x) and IE (5.x) because neither seems to be free from choking on Java/Javascript
- Browser incompatibility: It seems like designers/coders usually target one platform and one browser with these systems (IE4.x/Windows) and just let other users rot. They're not too forgiving of low-power PCs or low-speed connections, either.
- Speed: They're either using an underpowered server, a slow connection, or horribly inefficient code. Slashdot, speed daemon that it is, whups the courseware I've seen. [grin]
- Ease of Use: Most instructors have real difficulty administering their courses. Assignments get losts, posts get deleted, student accounts disappear. These are CS instructors too, I can only imagine the grief and pain Humanities people go through.
The few sucessful forums I've seen use a mailing list. [with a separate address for sumbissions] The security isn't good, but the forum is very easy to use for both students and instructors. News would be an improvement in that you could support threaded discussions more eaily, but that would probably be offset by the pain involved in having to handle large binaries in broken newsreaders.Personally, if they could do a web forum right, then I'd be a little more forgiving. The few I've seen have been bad to terrible, and they'll always be pretty slow compared to a mailing list or newsgroup.
Using class for usenet purposes (Score:1)
Re:Why should a professor bother? (Score:1)
Isn't the point to learn the material rather than to keep a seat warm? If the student doesn't show, but learns his stuff and passes the test, congratulations!
Personally, I've always prefered a more self-guided approach to learning stuff (yes, in school and at work). I'm biased, of course, but I actually think you often learn better that way.
Content- Make it useful, make it interesting (Score:1)
Put additional information, encourage the professors to write often, say an in-depth look at something they passed over quicly at class.
And special interest: I don't know what sort of stuff Chem Students find interesting, but find out and set up a parallel thread about music, anime, beer or whatever.
Of course, try to make it as simple as possible to actually use it, as well as relatively painless to learn it.
Re:Why should a professor bother? (Score:1)
Not newsgroups, but email (Score:1)
Also, email is going to be more commonly used by most students i.e. they know how to use it already. Most profs. also use the listserv to send notices to the class and info thats sorta important. I use Usenet to a great extent but newsgroups, I feel, wouldn't be checked as often as email would. Now using an email newsgroup gateway would give the best of both situations...
Plus, I filter out and seperate my course listservs to seperate mailboxs, so I don't have to look at it is I don't want :) Thank goodness for procmail!
Takes time (Score:1)
Re:motivation (Score:1)
As a side note we did something similar to this at my uni. during my final year using a system called FirstClass. Its specifically developed for for interactive CBT and remote learning.
Links
Firstclass intranet and collaborative classroom [softarc.com]
Sheffield Hallam University virtual campus [shu.ac.uk]
--
Lauren Child, lauren@laurenchild.net [mailto]
All my CS classes use them (Score:2)
All the TA's and profs monitor them and respond to students question very frequently and reliably.
The newgroups are only available from on campus computers, but telneting in to read the news is no problem. Telnet and UNIX are also required skills for CS here too. It's just sort of expected that everyone learn how to use the stuff. Some classes even have an Assignment 0 that doesn't count for much but the assignment is to post to the newsgroup or read the webpage or figure out how to do something on Unix (solaris).
It works quite well and honestly, i wouldn't want it any other way. For instance, today i was working on an assigment and got stuck. I posted to the newsgroup and emailed the TA and within the hour she responded and helped me out.
Web pages are useful for relatively static material, but the newsgroups are invaluable for assignment discussion and announcements. It also helps if you can't make it too class. Because anything important you missed (like exam changes etc) will get posted the the newsgroup.
So it's cool. But make sure the newgroups are private on your servers only.
If somebody really needs to post a graphic or a link or something, it's all good because chances are most people are reading news with netscape or outlook anyway.
Why should a professor bother? (Score:2)
For instance, he could show up in class only when there will be tests. That wouldn't be the case if he had to go to class to find out when the tests are (ok, it's a weak example, but I still think it proves my point).
Re:Why should a professor bother? (Score:2)
Obviously, you've never taught a class.
It's extremely frustrating and disheartening if your class attendance is poor. It's one thing if only a few people sign up for a class - you know how many there are and you can plan accordingly. It's quite another when you spend hours or days preparing for a class, expecting a bunch of people, and only a few show up. It means that even though you made the effort to make the class a worthwhile experience, most people thought it was a waste of time.
Re:Web-based? (Score:2)
In the past, Taco and Co. have mentioned a usenet interface to slashdot as a possible future feature. This is desparately needed. I will explain why:
-- Web based discussion boards generally lack the ability to quickly see what posts are new when revisting a discussion. In gnus (my newsreader of choice) the old posts would be marked; I could re-read them if necessary but I can also quickly read the replies.
-- You need to allow more flexibility for posters in composition. Yes, I know I could compose this post in emacs and then cut-and-paste it in, but I should be able to read and post from pine or trn or emacs or whatever I want. Browsers just aren't as configureable; when mozilla allows you to use elisp or guile or something to write your own editting modes for forms, that will be a start.
-- You use less bandwidth.
-- To address the lack of HTML complaint: you can post html if you want, many newsreaders will parse it. But actually html is not well suited to short email and post like messages. Sure, I could have composed this using html tags to make a bulletized list. But why ? What about links, you say ? XEmacs (and most other readers) will recognize a URL and make it clickable -- and it's harder to disguise a link to goatse.cx as something else. This sounds like the complaint of someone who hasn't used the netnews enough.
One last thought: I have been trying to get the time to learn how to use gnus score files. It seems to me that if you set up a way to share score files, and to continuous "meta-moderate" a selection of other people's score files as you browsed/read, then you would have a much better way of doing slashdot. Essentially you could automaticaly find that set of moderators that most aggreed with your preferences.
As for educational related use of newsgroups -- I think the main benefit is that one person's question, and the answer, is seen by everyone; so that those people who never ask questions and never visit the professor/TA will benefit by lurking and listening to the more aggressive ones.
Did this ~15 years ago. (Score:2)
As I recall, it worked pretty well. Common homework questions (confusions) were regularly posted and answered (often by the TAs after a student asked them directly). It provides on thing that would be much more difficult with web access - a place for students to provide direct unfiltered (or filtered) feedback in real time.
The web allows a one way pipeline pretty well - but I think education should be more than that.
Web-based? (Score:3)
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 (Score:3)