[seul-edu] Mail list versus UUNET newgroup

[G <guycad@mindspring.com>]

Hello everyone,

I'm normally a lurker but thought I'd break my silence for a
change. I'm not an educator, just an interested party.

Back in Dec, the questionm was raised of whether or not to set
up a newsgroup for suel-edu. At the time, the conversation
didn't go much further than that. I believe that there were
about three replies.

It occurs to me however, that moving to forum software might be
a much better direction to go. 

Doug (Doug Loss), I know you frequent varlinux.org as you submit
all of the suel-edu 'Linux in Education reports' there all the
time. Have you perused Nick's forums section? I've posted a
number of threads in his forums section and I find that I like
the software a great deal. (hint: WhiteFang) In fact, when I
eventually set up a web site of my own, I intend to set up a
forum section based on the same software in it too.

The forum software Nick is using is FUDforum at
http://fud.prohost.org/. Of course, it runs on Linux.

Not only do I think it would be good for suel-edu, it would
probably be good for schools as well as an internal bulliten
board / chat area. With it's rather flexible security
provisions, you could set up forums for students, parents,
teachers or any combination.

For example: I imagine that you could make a category of read
only threads containing homework assignments for various
classes. These would be updatable by the teachers and read only
by the students or their parents. And if you do it cleverly
enough, you could probably make use of the automatic email
notification (when a new item is posted to a thread) to send out
email notifications to parents that want (subscribe) to see what
homework their kids have been assigned.

Teachers could have their own forums to discuss class
co-ordination of field trips and extracuricular activities. (I'm
stretching here as I don't really 'know' what teachers discuss.)
Student clubs and such could have their own sections too.

I realize there is special purpose software available to perform
some if not all of these functions (based on my readings) but
I've been impressed with the FUDforum software as a mature and
well supported application that should be pretty easy to set up.
(yes, I know - a run on sentence.)

Best regards,
Guy

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