I wonder how much of the course newsgroup failure problem can be traced to the general lack of writing ability. I'm in my last undergrad semester and while I no longer see people who can't spell "the" reliably, I still would say my writing skills (which I don't consider anything special) are in the 95% percentile for engineers.

It's one thing to turn in a poorly written paper to a prof or teacher, because (with all due respect) most students have cultivated the ability to ignore what the teachers say about their work after 10-15 years in the school system. (Our coddling students and allowing them to ignore the feedback with no significant consequences (until they get out into the "real world") is one way of looking at the root educational problem of our time... but I digress...) It's another to participate in a class writing environment, where people will know your name and realize that you aren't capable of writing better then a so-called "normal" sixth grader.

"prof... i dont' get chap. sixth. Coud;l you re-explainate The Pythogorrus Thoeryies?"

(See? I can't even fake it convincingly; it's too strange to my mind.)

Who wants to "speak up" in class when their speech reads like that? Combine that with the inability to type at a reasonable speed, and I don't think participation will be high enough to make it truly worth-while as a reliable teaching method for a while.

Forced participation doesn't help, of course; you can't require that your students have questions. The best students may answer them before they are done typing, the worst studets are probably just plain lost, and the middle students may be talking to each other outside of class anyhow. Or perhaps the subject matter doesn't lend itself well to questions. Require the students to come up with something and of course they can, but you can't require that the ensuing discussion have quality.

(I think my current Multimedia prof has the best use of the technology yet, it's just not whiz-bang enough to be worth writing a paper on. He allows and encourages people to e-mail him questions, then if he feels the answer is of sufficient interest to us all, he e-mails the entire class with the answer, on the theory that if one person's asking, at least five are wondering. Takes no class time, very little extra effort on student or prof's part, works wonders. Twice this semester I was about to ask him something only to open my e-mail program and find the answer waiting in my inbox.)