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by Robin Delisle,
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Electronic Forum An electronic forum is a collaborative network in which teachers, pupils or students exchange or collect data and practise skills. An electronic forum has two aspects: Meeting on the Internet, using newsgroups. A newsgroup is a virtual space particulary adapted for electronic meetings. Software such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Netscape Messenger or Outlook Express allows for subscription to newsgroups. Meeting on an Intranet, where collaborative software is used (Netmeeting for Windows, Gnomemeeting for Linux)
Origin The idea of this e-learning system was developed in Collège Blaise Pascal (Viarmes, Val d'Oise, a suburb of Paris) in 2000 by Robin Delisle and has continued to run since its inception. Academic newsgroups of Latin and ancient Greek were created on the Versailles Academy server Collaboration using Newsgroups Newsgroups allow for many different kinds of collaboration, where students from different countries can communicate and work on the same projects: such newsgroups are ideal spaces for European collaborations. Newsgroups allow teachers and students to get out of their classrooms in a virtual environment and meet other teachers, students and specialists, who can be very far away sometimes. For example, a considerable discussion about archaic Roman religion, as established by Numa Pompilius, has been shared by pupils of five classes, from all over France. The threads of the discussion included debates, overviews and statements about this subject. Collaboration using an Intranet Software such as Netmeeting or Gnomemeeting allows users to share all installed software on a computer, allowing for collaborative chat and artwork, amongst other things. Students can take notes on their own computers and at the same time visit a website, or translate a Latin or Greek text, with comments that their teacher shares with them. The texts appear on every screen. This method opens up many possibilities and combinations: the computer can become a moving board, personalised and shared at the same time, while the Internet can remain accessible in the background. The teacher is the boardmaster, making data and exercises appear on the screens of the students. Teaching an electronic lesson During a lesson concerning Xenophanes and his views on polytheism, the teacher gives an IP address and activates Netmeeting, also starting up a text editor and an Internet browser. He loads a page on a website in which pupils can find the famous fragment of Xenophanes in ancient Greek, "If horses or oxen or lions had hands and could produce works of art, they too would represent the gods after their own fashion (fragment 15)." He copies and pastes the text and then underlines verbs and sets colours for accusatives and nominatives. He raises questions concerning analysis of the text. Various students help him, working on their own terminals. Then, using the chat facility, the teacher sends the vocabulary of the text and receives submissions from each student and finally, a collaborative translation is developed. Following this exercise, the teacher asks the students to browse the web and search for Xenophanes, in the expectation that they will find out about the philosopher's views on monotheism. He selects the best summary and posts it on the academic newsgroup of ancient Greek. There, another class has left some research about Homer, concerning descriptions of the gods in the Iliad. These descriptions are what Xenophanes particularly criticises. There is a link between Xenophanes' theories and Homer's portrayal of the gods. The homework of pupils will be to think about this link. At the following session, the pupils will publish their comments on the newsgroup. |
With the support of the European Commission within the framework of the Socrates Comenius programme.