Newsgroups groups were completely foreign to me before embarking on this module. I understand the underlying principle behind them and what they are for but to be honest even after extensively navigating the various platforms (Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, etc.) I still don’t feel very confident with them. My favorite was Google Groups:
I found them very daunting and haphazardly organized. Some were better than others, but it seemed to me that if you didn’t have something specific in mind you to search for, you would find endless options of loosely related topics and thousands of them. I just felt like the navigational interface was not as user friendly as some other online platforms.
The visual appeal and user interface of these newsgroup platforms could be more appealing, and if I feel this way my students will most definitely feel the same way. This lack of appeal can translate to less motivation and interest for the student’s when using platforms like this.
The process of signing up (creating an account), linked to email, has scared me off using them in education as there are many problems with newsgroups that arise from giving out your email. The fact that your email is given out and you might then receive endless amounts of spam seems inappropriate for school use. It just seems like more of a hassle than it’s worth especially if you were dealing with younger grades. There was just a lot of irrelevant material that you and your students would have to navigate through and it would also cause unwanted junk mail to deal with, which are both time consuming and irrelevant. Many of the groups out there also contain spam, inappropriate language, and prompts for pornography which can make them dangerous in a classroom setting.
The fact that USNET itself predates the internet tells me that there are probably better, newer, more user friendly online options of accomplishing a particular task. So all in all I would probably not use this technology in my classroom unless I had much more confidence in navigating through the junk and it being pivotal to learning.
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