One element of professional development is a "Study Group." The idea of the Study Group is a group of people meets together and has discussions about specific topics over long period of time. However, realistically it is hard to schedule the time for meetings and it costs participants' commute time --besides discussion time, efforts, and meeting placees etc. Therefore, we propose here "Newsgroups" as an alternative way of facilitating the Study Group.
The "Newsgroups" are electronic discussion groups and unlike e-mail, they are organized discussions by certain topics. As we have discussed earlier (see details), a "threading" is a challenge of using e-mail. If you are using e-mail, you may aware that you are receiving various kinds of e-mail messages everyday, such as personal messages from your best friend or a special memo from your boss, and you do not want to mix them up. You can use different mailboxes to organize your different kinds of messages. However, if the Study Group discussions continue over years, and several topics are discussed at the same time, e-mail might not the best communication tool for the Study Group. Because newsgroups organize discussions by specific topics, newsgroups would be better for on-going discussions of the Study Group.
Typical news server provides over 2,500 newsgroups and these newsgroups are categorized by their interests such as music, art, biology, and computer. Here is one example of a list of newsgroups related to k-12 education (Click here).
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