(Fwd: *C&CD*) Usenet University and alt.uu.future - description and plans (5)
COMPDIGEST
Date: Mon, 29 Jun 1992 11:28:39 GMT
From: jkp%cs.h...@CARNEGIE.BITNET (Jyrki Kuoppala)
Sender: IN%"lv08+%ANDREW....@CARNEGIE.BITNET" "Lili Velez"
Message-id: <1992Jun29.1...@nntp.hut.fi>
Subject: Usenet University and alt.uu.future - description and plans (5)
Reply-to: Computers & Composition Digest (R. Royar) <R0MI...@ULKYVX.BITNET>
[Followups directed to alt.uu.future]
Contents:
1. What is Usenet University?
2. What the name means and how to participate in UU
3. Goals and principles
4. Administration
5. Copyright on the articles and learning material
6. Technology
7. Disciplines or division of topics
8. Practical steps
1. What is Usenet University?
Usenet University, or UU (not to be confused with Uppsala University)
is, or more accurately will be, a society of people interested in
learning, teaching or tutoring. There is no formal organization or
funding at least as of yet, and the concept exists currently mostly in
the newsgroup alt.uu.future which was created on June 12, 1992. It is
the group for discussing the future of Usenet University, and
discussions on alt.uu.future will to a large extent shape what the UU
will become. Many people have already participated on the discussion
and influenced the shaping of this document. (If you do not get
alt.uu.future, contact your news administrator for more information if
it's a problem with the propagation or some other reason - the
administrator often can provide a newsgroup when requested).
2. What the name means and how to participate in UU
"Usenet" refers to the global conferencing network used as a media or
one of the medias for Usenet University, as well as the "spirit" of UU
- UU is open to anyone who can access it, free for expressing ideas,
is quite a bit anarchistic in nature, and thus as Usenet newsgroups UU
will be what the participants cause it to be.
"University" refers to the "community" aspect of UU, not so much to
"university level" or "academic discipline", neither does it mean that
there are specific plans for UU to become a university where you can
get a certificate from. This doesn't mean to say that certificates or
recgonition of Usenet University by accepted academic would be
unthinkable, just that it isn't central to the concept of UU at least
at this point in the development. Certificates and recognition
probably will come via cooperation with existing organization if they
will.
For now, Usenet Univesity will operate under the "alt" hierarchy, as
"alt.uu.*". It would be desirable to later move to a separate
distribution, out from under alt when there will be numerous
newsgroups for various areas of learning. Thus, there would be a
separate distrubution and hierarchy like (just an example)
uu.future
uu.lang.esperanto.beg
uu.lang.esperanto.material
uu.lang.esperanto.exercises
uu.comp.lang.pascal.env.gnu
uu.comp.lang.pascal.beg
However, "uu" is already taken by Uppsala University. Alternative
names possible for the distribution are World University (wu),
Planetary University (pu), Virtual University etc. There will be time
to discuss and decide this when the change to a separate distribution
and hierarchy is made - for now the name is Usenet University and the
hierarchy is alt.uu, ie. the hierarchy will be something like the
above list with "alt." prepended.
3. Goals and principles
One primary goal of UU is to use Usenet communications to offer
participants possibilities to learn things, to educate themselves, to
teach others, to exchange information on learning materials, tools and
techniques as well as publish learning material itself. In this
respect UU will aim to become a kind of "place to learn".
Connected with this, a primary principle of UU is openness, to stay
open for anyone passing by just willing to learn, with little formal
qualifications or requirements. To try to commit to this principle
much of the activity will happen on open newsgroups. It probably will
be desirable to have some kind of classifications in some of the
groups for "beginner" and "advanced" topics to avoid problems of
participants having very different vocabularies, concepts, levels of
expertise etc. and thus communications problems. To implement
classification and make groups more worthwhile with moderated
newsgroups, a possibility would be to have a matching unmoderated one
from which "the cream" will be replicated on the moderated group.
One important goal is to offer several alternative ways for learning.
People learn best with different ways - some learn by reading books on
their own, some by browsing around and experimenting, some prefer
tutors or close teacher/student relationships, some prefer
lectures/classes with strict structure, some learn by doing. All
these should be provided with an opportunity to learn with the style
they prefer - it might mean there would be several groups for one
topic, using different methodologies.
One goal is to create, organize and offer references to learning
material, to maintain lists of literature, Usenet newsgroups, ftp
sites and services, libraries and so on relevant to fields
One goal is to offer discussion groups for students who learn by
tossing ideas around and discussing them, asking each other and
helping each other out.
One possible goal is to create and archive learning material
(tutorials, exercies) itself.
One possible goal is to offer possibilites for tutors and students to
find each other for email teaching.
4. Administration
There are decisions to be made concerning the process of creation of
newsgroups, possible moderation of them, how to divide topics and
disciplines, how to handle possible (probable) flame wars and other
possibly destructive phenomena, and so on. Some kind of a
decision-making process will need to be established for these. To be
compatible with the goals and principles of UU, some kind of a
groupware decision-making support system would be useful to help the
process.
To better classify information exchange and to provide feedback for
participants, some kind of accreditation / peer review system is
desirable. Here again groupware mechanisms and tools would be useful
for being compatible with the openness principles, dividing work and
avoiding single point of failure.
5. Copyright on the articles and learning material
According to the Berne convention, the author has the copyright on his
or her work. If a base of learning material is created, copyright is
a relevant issue - should a "Usenet University" trust be created which
holds the copyright, should the authors have the copyright with some
kind of a GNU-like copyright, should the authors have the copyright
and give other only the right to copy the documents in the UU context,
should the created documents be put in the public domain. There are
lots of possibilities and at least if the aim is to create a big base
of material some guidelines need to be established.
6. Technology
Technology which people os Usenet have varies widely. Many have
text-only 80 x 24 character displays, while many have workstations
with big graphics screens with perhaps also color and sound, and
software for multi-media email. This needs to be addressed - for
topics like learning to speak languages, for example sound can be an
essential part and transmitting sounds on UU would be very beneficial.
Besides the capabilites of the media, access to on-line resources such
as ftp servers, archie, www, wais servers, newsgroup archives and
other services on the Internet varies. Some only have a Usenet feed
with little possibility to access on-line services, some have very
fast lines to the rest of the world and some are in between.
These differences probably will divide discussions a bit - for
learning of languages for example it could be useful to have a
separate group for those who have sound capabilities, to avoid
frustration on the part of those with no such access.
7. Disciplines or division of topics
There are several possibilities for how to divide topics handled in
UU. There is the discipline division of the scientific community,
there are various classifications used by libraries, there is the
Usenet newsgroup division, etc. It probably is not wise to use
strictly just any one of these divisions, but it would seem useful to
borrow from many of them.
This is an issue which needs discussing.
8. Practical steps
To get things rolling, we should discuss some suggestions for topics
you think would be good as "prototype topics", with suggestions for
group names. These topics should be ones for which there are enough
people interested on to reach "critical mass". One possibility would
be to take a topic for which there already is reference material for -
some newsgroups on Usenet have excellent FAQs with literature
references, answers to many questions, hints from old-timers etc.
which could offer a good start for a tutorial on the topic.
It probably will be desirable to have a few groups for each topic. An
example division would be to have one group for generic discussions
and one for material references / exercises / other
"carefully-written" articles standing on their own. Alternatively a
system of keywords in the Subject field could be adopted (like used in
sci.virtual-worlds) to mark the type of each article, but for
unmoderated groups it would be hard to maintain the practice.
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