Schools should USE usenet
While sorting my results for the highly successful mining endeavor that has collected the material for Eastgate’s Compendium of Academic resources, I had a thought. There was an old syllabus, encouraging students to post on the then lively alt.hypertext usenet newsgroup. It occurred to me that, if only more syllabi would do this, then usenet would flourish rather than flounder. My own college has endeavored to build a very effective way to share ideas online with blackboard software. While blackboard does a lot that usenet doesn’t, like manage grades and assignments, the discussions there are limited by the number of people in them. Usenet groups might be able to bring together these kinds of discussions from all over the world, joining classes of students by subject, and inviting a variety of approaches. Just a thought.