USENET as a teaching tool
Carl T. Erickson · 1993
USENET is a distributed bulletin board with approximately 2.7 million users.Some schools, particularly those without Intemet access, do not have USENET available locally.Many schools already have local USENET sites, but do not take advantage of this resource in a formal way.In the first case this paper should serve as a point of departure to becoming a USENET site.In both cases I hope to inspire faculty to consider how USENET can contribute to their students' learning experience.This paper explains what USENET is, what resources are required to be a USENET site, and how USENET has been used in upper-level computer science courses. WHAT IS USENET?USENET is anarchy at its best.When people refer to USENET they usually mean the diverse collection of information passing through USENET at any given time, but they may also be referring to the people or software which bind this distributed system together.Gene Spafford of Purdue University (one of the people who should know best), defines USENET as the collection of people who exchange information with USENET [6].How much information is that?According to statistics collected from uunet, one of the main USENET sites, the volume of information over two weeks is around 232,000 articles comprising 457 Mbytes submitted from 20,000 sites by 53,000 different users to 3,600 newsgroups.The total number of