This will give you a chance to become familiar with the etiquette and styles of various newsgroups. The newsgroups news.announce.newusers and news.newusers.questions offer excellent information for beginners. In the Penn State computing environment a number of special newsgroup hierarchies have been developed. One of these is the psu hierarchy, which limits distribution to Penn State computer systems and serves for discussion related to Penn State. Classnews Classnews, a subset of Netnews at Penn State, allows on-line discussion by the instructor and members of a particular course.
Instructors choose whether to take an active or passive role in the flow of the discussion.
Although articles may be hidden by the newsreader after being read, all articles remain in the newsgroup for the duration of the semester and can be displayed again if needed. Classnews newsgroups are typically activated in the first weeks of a semester and remain in effect for the duration of the semester. Private Classnews Private newsgroups are available only to the students who are registered in the class and others authorized by the instructor. Each class is assigned a private newsgroup. Students registered for a particular class are assigned to the appropriate newsgroup by information gathered from the class registration records.