Jeremy [iRights] Bowers makes some insightful comments in the RE: Horses to Water: Why Course Newsgroups Fail thread.

I wonder how much of the course newsgroup failure problem can be traced to the general lack of writing ability. I'm in my last undergrad semester and while I no longer see people who can't spell "the" reliably, I still would say my writing skills (which I don't consider anything special) are in the 95% percentile for engineers.

By now I hope most of my students will know how important I believe writing skills to be.

David's Thursday issue of SiT has a wee op-ed on the use of newsgroups:

As with all tasks in a course, posting assignments, whether e-mail or newsgroup, only make sense as a means to an end, i.e. as part of a larger learning objective and assignment.

I certainly agree with David that the medium is a means to an end but there are some advantages to newsgroups - threading being one - in comparison to e-mail. If I do get e-mail that I think should be widely disseminated then I often post (the reply to) it to the newsgroup for the class.

Much of the discussion about this issue is actually taking place in the class newsgroup(s) so I'll summarise them in this thread in due course.

Thanks to everyone who is taking the time to contribute to the discussion.