PHIL 290 -- The Newsgroup

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Caveats, Policies, Pointers, and Tips

Caveats

First caveat: your grade on the newsgroup assignment will determine a sizable chunk of your overall grade for the course -- 25%. That means you can't afford to take this particular assignment lightly.

Second caveat: the zeros I record for missing newsgroup submissions will rapidly take a toll on your class average. If you miss three weeks, the effect will be a 5-point reduction in your overall average for the semester; miss six, and the effect will be to bring your overall average down by a letter grade -- e.g., from a "B" to a "C".

Policies

The policy regarding the content of what you post is as follows. Your required article each week must be on a course-related topic. It can be a contribution to the discussion of one of the discussion questions I post for the week in question, but this is not required. I'll start the subject line of each of those questions with a pair of numerals to make it easy to identify them -- a Roman numeral to indicate the week, and an Arabic numeral to give the question a number of its own: "I.1", "I.2", etc. Your required article may therefore be a reply to one of these questions, or a response to such a reply, or a response to a response to such a reply, and so on -- or it can be on any other course-related topic.

Finally, as I've already said in the syllabus, I expect your contributions to the newsgroup to be carefully and thoughtfully written. This means you'll need to spend time and thought on this assignment -- both in reading other people's contributions and in crafting your own. Slapdash work will be penalized. Specifically, my grading policy is as follows:

• For every posted article, you'll get at least a "C" -- provided that the article qualifies as "carefully and thoughtfully written." "B"s and "A"s will be awarded to reflect content that in one way or another is either especially interesting or especially well done. For writing that is either careless or just plain bad, I'll reduce your qualitative score by up to two letter grades (so "D"s and "F"s are certainly possible on the newsgroup), and the same goes for writing that's more or less mindless or out and out blather.
• For every missing article, you'll get a zero. See caveat #2 above regarding the cumulative effect of these zeros.

Among the things I'll be looking for in assessing the quality of your contributions are these:

• Genuinely interesting contributions to the discussion.
• Trenchant critical observations.
• Cogent arguments.
• Good, clear writing that's free of errors in spelling, punctuation, grammar, and diction. (1)

Pointers and Tips

Connecting to the newsgroup. Whether you do this from home, a dorm room, or a computer lab, the easiest way to connect to the newsgroup is probably via our class web site at:

http://www.unco.edu/philosophy/current/290-009.html

Once there, click on the link that reads "Join the Discussion Now." If you're using Netscape Communicator, you'll be connected to the group and you can start reading the contributions others have already made. If you're using Internet Explorer, clicking on that same link will launch Outlook Express, where you'll need to select "Accounts" in the "Tools" menu to set up your e-mail and news accounts in order to do anything else. (2)

Reading and replying to articles already posted. Once you've connected to the newsgroup, read over the articles others have posted (if you skip this step, you'll reap a lot less than half of the benefit of the assignment in the end). To respond to one of the discussion questions or to another article that's already been posted, just select (or open) the article to which you want to respond, choose the appropriate command (it's "Reply to Newsgroup" in both Communicator and Internet Explorer's Outlook Express), and you'll get a composition window with the newsgroup's address and the subject line already filled in. Don't select the "New Message" command unless you've already posted your required article for the week and you want to start a brand new thread on a completely new subject. Even if you insert something of the form "Re: ..." into the subject line of a new message, it won't wind up where you want it. A new message won't be threaded together with other messages on the same subject regardless of its subject line.

Starting a whole new thread. To start a discussion on a completely new subject, the "New Message" command is the one you want. Select it with the newsgroup window open, but without any particular message selected, and you'll get a composition window to write it in. This time, you must fill in the subject line yourself so as to give the new thread a name. Pick a name that's as descriptive as you can make it of the subject you want to discuss. Subject lines such as "Hey, everybody!" or "What do you think about this?" are as annoying as they are uninformative.

Entering your name, your e-mail address, and the names of your mail and news servers. If you're using Internet Explorer, you'll have done this already. If you're using Netscape Communicator, make sure, before you actually post anything, that you enter your name, your e-mail address, the name of your SMTP (outgoing) mail server, and the name of our news server ("cronkite.unco.edu", without the quotes) in the appropriate places in the Preferences file (via the Edit menu). If you don't, you'll wind up posting, if at all, under someone else's name, which will confuse folks and could mean that you won't get the credit you deserve for your work!

Posting to the right place. Also make sure whenever you're responding to someone and not starting a new thread of your own that you actually post your article to the newsgroup and don't just e-mail it to the person to whom you're responding. There are several options available (including, for example, both posting the article to the newsgroup and e-mailing it to the person to whom you're responding, which in certain circumstances, might be the very thing). Check the options out and make sure you pick the right one. Otherwise, you'll soon be wondering what happened to your articles, and it'll turn out that you've e-mailed them to various people but failed to post them to the newsgroup.

Reviewing your submissions. Don't expect, once you've posted your article, that it will appear immediately along with the others. At a minimum, you'll need to use something like Communicator's "Get New Messages" command or Outlook Express's "Refresh Message List" command and scroll all the way down to the bottom of the message window to see any new messages you've posted. You may even need to quit and restart the application to see what you've posted. Bear this in mind, or it's likely you'll wind up posting articles more than once.

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¹ This isn't an English class, but skill in writing matters, and I'm going to hold your feet to the fire on this. If you know you aren't a good speller, spell check your work before you post it, using a dictionary to resolve difficult cases. Learn how to handle such groups of homophones as "effect" and "affect," "then" and "than," "since" and "sense," and "to," "too," and "two," and for goodness' sake, learn how to spell the names (and how to form the possessives of the names) of the philosophers we're studying this semester. If you don't know how to punctuate or to write good grammatical English, it's time for you to learn how. I highly recommend the following two books on punctuation and grammar, both by Karen Elizabeth Gordon: The New Well-Tempered Sentence (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1993) and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire (New York: Pantheon Books: 1993). For general overall advice on good writing, there's still nothing better than The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White, third edition (New York: Allyn & Bacon, 1995).

² What you'll need to supply for the e-mail account is your name, your full e-mail address and the address of your SMTP (i.e., outgoing) mail server. For the news account, you'll need to supply the name of the server that hosts our group: "cronkite.unco.edu" (without the quotes).

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