Archive-name: usenet-univ-FAQ Last-modified: 1993-02-02 Posted monthly on alt.uu.announce and alt.uu.future (and news.answers). Summary of changes since the previous posting: none Available by anonymous ftp on host nic.funet.fi, in file pub/doc/uu/FAQ and via the gopher server at Helsinki University of Technology otax.tky.hut.fi/70, English/Topics/Learning. Contains the "what-is-uu" document (nic.funet.fi:/pub/doc/uu/what-is-uu) and a current list of UU groups (nic.funet.fi:/pub/doc/uu/newsgroups), both of which plus this document are also available in gopherspace. Followups on this article are directed to alt.uu.future. ---------------------------------------- Recent happenings: - (Oct 1992)joe@astro.as.utexas.edu (Joseph C Wang) is maintaining a list of volunteers willing to answer questions on particular topics via email (Usenet University Consultants List - New Network Academy). The list as last posted is article <82789@ut-emx.uucp>, a copy of which is available also at nic.funet.fi pub/doc/uu/consultants and via otax.tky.hut.fi gopher server. - (Oct 1992) esz001@cck.coventry.ac.uk (Will Overington) is working with Esperanto in alt.uu.lang.esperanto.misc - (Dec 1992) jgoodwin@adcalc.fnal.gov (John Goodwin) posted a freelore project invitation to join on alt.uu.future. (at least some of the postings are in nic.funet.fi pub/doc/uu/freelore, everything of course in the newsgroup archive - in the future nic.funet.fi pub/doc/freelore will have more information) - (Jan 1993) groups alt.uu.lang.russian.misc and alt.uu.comp.os.linux. questions created ---------------------------------------- What is UU? 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. Later steps 9. What to do to keep the UU ball rolling and growing? 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 medium or one of the media for Usenet University, as well as the "spirit" of UU - UU is open to anyone who can access it, free for expressing ideas, is a bit anarchistic (meaning no central administration and no hierarchy) in nature, and thus as Usenet newsgroups UU will be what the participants cause it to be - hopefully a functioning open venue for novel thoughts and ideas about learning and other topics. "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. Later steps To get things rolling with respect to full-fledged course on UU, we should discuss 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" to develop the course material. 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 and/or a course run by teachers 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. 9. What to do to keep the UU ball rolling and growing? For all who are willing to support the idea of UU and possible similar community projects / resources (like a community effort encyclopaedia, dictionaries between different languages), the thing to do is to _contribute_ something - just a simple thing like drafting a two dozen-item itemized list of subtopics on a thing you know something about and which you think could be turned into a document for others to read and help them learn. Then others could fill in things on the document, and with each person contributing just a relatively small amount of work, something just might come out of it. Another thing to do would be to point out the UU idea and UU groups to people on other Usenet groups on topics you're interested in - many Usenet groups have FAQ's which are good information resources on the topic field, and the UU groups could be used as a media to develop those FAQ's. ---------------------------------------- Current newsgroups These groups (all but alt.uu.future created 22 July 1992) are part of the Usenet University. For futher information on UU, see directory pub/doc/uu on the machine nic.funet.fi. A "material" group means that the group exists for postings of course material, announcements, pointers to material and resources, essays, etc. relevant to the "department" of the group and/or the topic. This group is for one-time articles / posts - discussions are _not_ suitable for this newsgroup but should instead be held in a corresponding .misc group. Followups should be directed and posted there. On some UU groups (where there is a volunteer teacher / teachers) the material will be mostly for course-like work, on others for self-study, on others the main info will be something else. The conventions will form as time passes and while there are none, a wide range of relevant postings will appear. Later, different styles of learning will perhaps spin off different newsgroups. A "misc" group exists for discussions on learning, followups on the "material" group articles, and other discussion relevant to the department or topic. For all departments / topics, there are as of yet no "material" groups but instead only .misc groups - in that case, articles fitting in the material group should be posted with "MATERIAL" as the first word in the Subject: field of the article. There are two ftp archives of the Usenet University newsgroups - one on nic.funet.fi, directory pub/archive and another at ftp.coe.montana.edu (192.31.215.240) in pub/uu/... For now at least the archives don't have articles from the epoch of UU but instead from a later point in time. The following groups have been created, most ones on 1992, July 22nd: alt.uu.lang.misc Language department of Usenet University This is a group for the "language department" of UU. This is the "main group" for learning languages, linguistics etc. - later there will be more specific groups for different topic in the field. alt.uu.math.misc Math department of Usenet University This is a group for the "math department" of UU. This is the "main group" for learning mathematics - later there will be more specific groups for different topic in the field. alt.uu.comp.misc Computer department of Usenet University This is a group for the "computer department" of UU. This is the "main group" for learning things to do with computers - later there will be more specific groups for different topic in the field. Both "computing science" and "using computers as tools" topics are suitable under this department, at first at least. Some of the computing science topics perhaps will fit better under math - the choice is left to each participant. alt.uu.lang.esperanto.misc Study of Esperanto in Usenet University This is a group for learning Esperanto. This is the "main group" for learning Esperanto - later there will be more specific groups for different topics in the field. alt.uu.lang.russian.misc Study of Russian in Usenet University This is a group for learning Russian. This is the "main group" for learning Russian - later there will be more specific groups for different topics in the field. alt.uu.comp.os.linux.questions UU Linux learning group - the Q&A column This group is an educational group aimed for learning and teaching of Linux by questions and answers. alt.uu.misc.misc Misc. department of Usenet University This is a group for learning about topics not suitable for other groups of UU. This is the "catch-all" group, "misc department" of UU. alt.uu.virtual-worlds.misc Study of virtual worlds in Usenet University This is a group for learning about virtual worlds or virtual reality. alt.uu.tools Tools for Usenet University and education This is a group for discussing tools useful in UU and self-education / distance education, what tools are recommended to be used with UU, what tools are helpful, where to get such tools, etc. Examples of the tools include machinery for viewing languages other than English on computers, possible UU "courseware" (for studying UU course pacakges) etc. alt.uu.announce Announcements of Usenet University This is a group for announcements of UU. alt.uu.future Planning the future of Usenet University This functions as a group to discuss the future of UU, and currently also as a "misc" group in which generic meta-discussions of UU take place. The first UU group, created in June 1992. ---------------------------------------- Feel free to use the UU groups! //Jyrki