A proposal to bootstrap Usenet University

Thread View: alt.uu.future

3 messages

[T] Back to Threads [V] Tree View [G] Group Articles

3 total messages Started by Joseph C Wang Wed, 30 Sep 1992 10:12

#98

Author: Joseph C Wang
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 10:12

27 lines
1869 bytes

I propose that UU circulate a list of volunteers who are willing to
answer questions on a particular topics over e-mail.  Readers who have
a question on that topic can look up the list and e-mail questions to
the users listed.  I hope this idea will help to "bootstrap" UU.
Hopefully over time, there will be more students and teachers, and UU
will gradually develop an infrastructure and be forced to resolve
issues regarding universities.

I'll volunteer to maintain this list.  If anyone wants to be added or
removed from the list of consultants, please e-mail me at
(joe@athena.mit.edu).

To get this list started on an experimental basis:

I (joe@athena.mit.edu) am willing to answer e-mail questions on
astrophysics and Chinese history.  I have a bachelor's degree in
physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and am now an
astronomy graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin and my
research consists now of studying the hydrodynamics of supernova
collapse.  My teaching experience consists mainly of serving as a lab
TA for AST103L (Introductory Astronomy Lab for Non-Majors) here at UT
Austin.

I'll try very hard to answer all the e-mail I get.  Since I don't know
what the volume of the e-mail I'll get will be, I can't guarantee
anything.  After about a month or so, I'll report back here with the
feedback I'm getting.

Re: A proposal to bootstrap Usenet University

#99

Author: Jyrki Kuoppala
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 13:51

24 lines
1622 bytes

>I'll try very hard to answer all the e-mail I get.  Since I don't know
>what the volume of the e-mail I'll get will be, I can't guarantee
>anything.  After about a month or so, I'll report back here with the
>feedback I'm getting.

Is it possible for you to archive all the questions and answers?  I
can arrange the archive to be put in the UU ftp archive.  That would
help to conserve the questions and answers to everyone else.

I don't see a problem with unarchived questions/answers by consultants
either - as it's the volunteer who is doing the work, it's her/his
choice.  I think it would just be more in sync with the ideas of
openness in UU and give a possibility and perhaps also incentive for
more people to participate.

One idea would be to set up the mailing addresses for consultants as
aliases which would automatically archive the mail and forward it to
the person answering them.

Anyway, if this sounds like too much red tape don't let it stop just
collecting the list of volunteers and going on with unarchived
answers.

//Jyrki

Re: A proposal to bootstrap Usenet University

#100

Author: Joseph C Wang
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 16:34

19 lines
1648 bytes

In article <1992Sep30.135148.14361@nntp.hut.fi> jkp@cs.HUT.FI (Jyrki Kuoppala) writes:
>Is it possible for you to archive all the questions and answers?  I
>can arrange the archive to be put in the UU ftp archive.

It was my intention to do that.  It's very, very difficult to sit down
in front of a blank sheet of paper and write courseware from scratch.
My hope is that if you get a lot of people asking and answering
questions, one will be able to organically "grow" courseware with much
less effort.

>One idea would be to set up the mailing addresses for consultants as
>aliases which would automatically archive the mail and forward it to
>the person answering them.

There's a system called OLC which is used at MIT to process consultant
transactions on their online help system.  It might be possible to
scale it up to handle transactions across the Internet and to have 
a central clearinghouse which automatically routes questions to 
consultants.

Thread Navigation

This is a paginated view of messages in the thread with full content displayed inline.

Messages are displayed in chronological order, with the original post highlighted in green.

Use pagination controls to navigate through all messages in large threads.

Back to All Threads