Email Discussion Groups

 By Erick Herouz, GTF, English

This article assumes that you already know why your class could benefit from an email discussion group, and that you are willing to get one started. Here are some practical pointers for UO instructors.

How do I get my students to use email?

Two necessities here: First, make a class packet of copies from the Computing Center handouts for students. Second, be sure to assign whatever you want your students to do. The handouts can be found in the lobby and in in the documents room in the Computing Center, and most can be downloaded. Incoming students will need:

If students think that the email discussion is extra-curricular or optional, they will not go out of their way to utilize it. If you want them to get an email account, you need to make that itself part of an assignment (e.g. "Introduce yourself to me by email by next Monday."). If you want every student to send about two messages per week to an online discussion, you need to tell them that's what you'll be looking for.

Where can students get access to a computer?

Most students will need to use a computer on campus -- Knight Library has more than 20 new machines, EMU has more than 100, both PC and Mac, SSIL has two dozen, and terminals are available in the Science Library, the Computing Center, and in 112 Willamette. Journalism students can get a pass in Allen Hall for the Brainerd Lab. Finally, if you have scheduled class time in Klamath Lab, your students will have access to the open part of the lab when you give them ID stickers.

Students who already have a computer at home can dial in to campus to get Internet access; they've already paid for it through student fees. Tell them that they don't need one of those commercial services such as America OnLine -- they can get a handout of instructions and shareware from the Computing Center. You should, however, allow extra time for those students to get online, especially during the early part of fall term, as the Computing Center staff are overloaded. Check with TEP for assistance if you run into seemingly unsolvable problems.

How do I start my own online discussion?

Two main options here: either apply for your own listserv or for your own newsgroup. The listserv allows your class complete privacy, but takes a while for the Computing Center folks to get set up for you. You also have to promise that you'll use it for at least a year. Students subscribe and unsubscribe their email addresses to your listserver. They send email to a single address, and it gets distributed to everyone else's email address in your class. On the other hand, the newsgroup is not so private -- anyone could read and post to it -- but it is easier to get started. And the newsgroup option allows for "threading," the ability to cluster messages within sub-topics. A direct reply to a post can be visually grouped with that original message -- automatically by the program. This could encourage an ongoing dialogue.

The listserv application is on the UO gopher menu. Go to the Index at the opening gopher menu, and type in mailserv. When filling out the application, select the option which allows any subscriber to post a message. Submit the application by email. Wait about two weeks. Tell your students how to subscribe themselves by email.

The newsgroup application is less formal. Send a request for your class to Joe St. Sauver at this address: newsadmin@news.uoregon.edu. A conventional title will be assigned, such as "uo.classes.wr.121" unless you specify another such as "uo.classes.Jones." Also, remember to ask that your newsgroup be set up as "local only." This will restrict reading and posting to the campus, and you'll worry less about how certain guerilla groups overseas view your students' remarks.

How do we read and write to these online discussions?

The listserv type is read by any email program. I use Pine on darkwing; many use Eudora from a desktop. Pine is easy enough -- and it comes with students' Gladstone accounts.

The newsgroup type can be read by many programs. Pine can also be used for newsgroups (though only on darkwing and gladstone -- not on oregon). Pine, however, does not show the "threading' ability noted above. Macs have access to a handy "NewsWatcher" that can be set to do threading. On gladstone and darkwing, the "tin" command brings up a fairly easy newsreader that can do threading. I advise against using the "trn" version, which unlike "tin," takes some time to learn, since it has so many options. Finally, Netscape can read and write with newsgroups, and it does threading too. In fact, Netscape is easy, colorful, and multitalented. It can be run from a desktop Windows or Mac, and from an X-terminal.

The Computing Center provides handouts about using Pine and tin. Also, they can show you how to download the software you need to run Netscape or NewsWatcher. Most of the computer labs on campus already have these and other programs available.

What else can students do with newsgroups?

Aside from starting one for your own class, newsgroups can be located for virtually any topic you might be studying. There are more than 5000 different newsgroups discussing everything from the ridiculous to the sublime. Last term a student in my research composition course asked a question about genetic engineering on a couple of rather technical newsgroups. He got polite and informative replies from French and American scientists. He referred to their responses in his WR123 paper.

You can ask students to post experimental messages to certain newsgroups, just to get a working sense of their own textual ethos and to having a real audience beyond the classroom. And if they discover that other people in faraway places are discussing the same topics as your class, they will begin to see it as more than merely an academic exercise.

What do students say about all this?

My unscientific survey showed that students mostly appreciated being able to email privately to their instructor -- even if they availed themselves of this privilege only twice throughout the term. They felt like a classroom barrier was transcended and that a special personal connection was established with their instructor. Even though my replies were brief and hardly personal, students sensed that I was giving them individual time and that we now shared something that the other students did not. When the majority of your class feels this way (with a few efficient exchanges of email), you really have obtained what many students and instructors long to create, but seldom have the time and energy for: a small community. Also, after some initial trepidation about this novel technology and about discussing ideas with their peers, most students came to appreciate being able to share their ideas about the course material with each other in a non-threatening space such as a listserv or a newsgroup. This required some prompting from me at first -- posting questions, insisting that this really was part of the actual course, facilitating exchanges, asking for follow-ups, etc. but after a couple of weeks, the students did fine on their own. Occasionally, they would even refer to their email discussion during our classroom discussion. A nice surprise was that the email discussion allowed for more students to take part in a class dialogue and that their contributions were better thought out and longer than is possible in a classroom discussion.

If you want more information, or if you need help with setting up a listserv or newsgroup for your course, contact Georgeanne Cooper at the Teaching Effectiveness Program. Our offices are at 65 PLC on Kincaid Street.

Lizard 26 Winter 95

 

    Address questions or comments about TEP or this site to:
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Last Modified: 03/18/10