Newsgroups

Going Further

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General information about Usenet newsgroups may be found in the following links.

• Usenet Info Center
• Newsgroups for K-12
• Master List of Newsgroup Hierarchies

Newsgroup issues specific to the K-12 environment are addressed at:

• Internet Newsgroups
• K-12 Internet and Web Issues

with the latter of these two links devoted to the issue of access control and child safety on the Internet.

One attractive alternative to Usenet newsgroups for educational applications is to create your own local newsgroup. It is possible to establish new newsgroups within Usenet hierarchies, but a much more flexible alternative is to set up your own discussion group on your local server, which is then completely under your control. Many of the comments made in the section concerning your own chat server then apply to such a newsgroups as well; the essential difference between chat groups and newsgroups is only that the former implement "real time" conversation while newsgroups involve posted messages that stay on the server for some period of time. Thus chat groups have more immediacy than newsgroups, but the latter are probably a better forum for more substantial discussions.

There are various pieces of software now available that allow such capabilities. One example is WWWBoard, which is written in the language PERL and must be installed on a Web server. This freeware program then allows you to set up a newsgroup that operates completely through the browser interface (without even invoking the newsreader). Posting and reading messages, and administrative tasks like deleting older messages, are all handled using just a normal web browser.

A description of such programs is a little beyond our scope here, since they typically require installation of CGI programs on your local server, or the use of proprietary commercial software. Installation of CGI programs like WWWboard is not difficult, and can probably easily be implemented by your Web server administrator. Here is an example of help files for WWWboard that contain screen shots of how it works, and here is a link to a working local newsgroup implemented using WWWBoard.