Newsgroups provide a more structure

Newsgroups provide a more structured format that allows professor-student and student-student discussion to be “threaded.” This means thatreplies are arranged hierarchically so that the reader can determine thethreads that run through a discussion. For example, a professor might pose a question like this one: “How are issues of justice addressed in Hawthorne’sThe Scarlet Letter?” One thread could be started with a student initiating adiscussion about legal interpretations of justice. Other students couldrespond to this student and each other on this topic. Another student mightbegin another thread on ethical justice, and students could respond withinthis thread as well. The threading is represented graphically, so that readerscan track the threads of the discussion through the various issues that areraised. Threaded discussions can be conducted on public newsgroups andalso have been incorporated into Web-based course development programslike WebCT (Goldberg & Salari, 1997).