Towards a better usage of the group
http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/Astronomy_Activities_2009/
1. Dear Rathnasree, Firstly you should try to find somebody to help you in organizing and keeping track of the group. If it goes on well, you could ask DST for funds. Your initiative is unique and requires appropriate support. Secondly, it would be worthwhile to save special write ups (Qs. and answers such as by Tanmoy in a separate file (may be in a Blog- I do not understand compositions of BLOGS, so that we do not keep on repeating Qs. and answers. Astronomy is a vast subject and I believe that the above suggestion would not lead to loosing spontaneity of Qs. by students ----- Rgds Govind Swarup Fri Mar 14, 2008 5:09 pm
2. Dear Prof. Govind Swaroop,
Thank you for your considerate thoughts. Yes, this is something that cannot be
handled by one or two people - help is required from as many people as would be
willing to lend a hand. If the word spreads around and we have more students as
well as more astronomers and enthusiastic educators - it should be possible to
sustain the group in a useful manner.
About the useful group discussions - yes, I am trying to archive all useful
discussions on our website. Actually, anyone who would pick up discussions that
they find interesting and place them on their website - with a link mentioning
that the discussions are from this group - would be very useful. The archived
discussions can be accessed on several webpages and we would also have a link to
the group from all these webpages. In addition, every webpage that is handlng
some of the archiving could also link to all other archiving efforts - we all
link to each other so that anyone coming across one end of the tangled thread
can read all archives. regards,
---- Rathnasree, Sat Mar 15, 2008 4:12 am
3. Dear Rathnasree,
I got word about this forum from our brief interaction on the SEDS Forums.
Thanks for letting me know about this list. I'm still interested in helping in
some way.
This is in relation to Govind Swarup sir's suggestion of having a blog to record
what's happening here. The question may be what to put on the blog?
1. It can include a question-answer format of posting. Each blog post containing
a question and answer provided by astronomers on the list.
2. It can also be extended to include activities announcements.
Besides being a great record, it's easier to edit and maintain than a website
and can be done without knowledge of HTML or any web programming languages.
Also, if needed, there're a lot of free resources and people out there who can
help us. Please consider doing this. It would be a great resource for Indians.
Also, it prevent's repeating questions as these can then be rolled into a FAQ
section somewhere on a more permanent website?
warm regards,
---- Pradeep, Sat Mar 15, 2008 10:31 am
4. I'd like to add another idea into the fray. There
are these things called discussion groups. Several of them are floating about on
the web. The best example perhaps is that of web discussion forums. You post a
question and then
people answer it. Messages from a given topic is grouped under a single thread.
Once a problem has been resolved, the thread is closed. If a particular question
turns out to be popular, the thread is made "sticky", which, as best as I
understand it, is something like "star"-ing a message in gmail or "flag"-ing it
in Yahoo!. The posts can be searched by Google. This results in thousands, if
not millions of people having access to the answers for a particular question.
Take the discussion forums for Linux as an example. The (open source => free,
and) very powerful operating system Linux, the mainstay of the scientific
community these days, is not very user-friendly and it it takes one years to get
comfortable with it. Customizing the system to one's needs is just like learning
a foreign language. One often stumbles in trying to get the system working the
way one wants and it is at these times that discussion forums are helpful. You
will find that any problem you would ever have with Linux would have been faced
by someone somewhere before and in all likelihood, that person would have posted
their problem on some web forum AND - and this is where the forum is useful -
someone from somewhere else in the world would also have answered it! It is
quite amazing when one thinks of it, but it works, and works very well, These
discussion forums have never failed me and are a very powerful tool for aiding
me in getting my work done.
Examples of forums:
http://ubuntuforums.org/
http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/
http://www.electronicsforu.com/electronicsforu/Bulletin/
http://www.techsupportforum.com/
----- Tanmoy, Sat Mar 15, 2008 11:25 am
5. Dear Rathnasree
In order to archive, it would be useful to have some keywords in the Qs. and
answers in order to be able to extract information from a large database that is
sure like to emerge in due course.
------ Govind Swarup, Sat Mar 15, 2008 6:01 pm
6. Tanmay and Rathnashree,
Discussion Forums - While the forums idea eliminates the need of mailing list --
it's a better way of doing what we're doing here. It avoids repeatition and also
allows multiple inputs. Also, it's a great archiving mechanism. The only thing
that a mailing list does is perhaps avoiding sign-up and having to remember one
more user id/password combination.
Blog - I think Prof Swarup suggested the blog only as an archiving mechanism.
It's easy to just copy-post these discussions. I think even Yahoo! has a message
archive system, but I'm not sure how much we can trust it and if it makes sense
to outsiders. For a blog post, you could just add the question and all related
replies and clarifications under a single blog post. Blogging platforms
available are - WordPress and Blogger.
Orkut/Facebook - I'm sure that many of the people here are also on many social
networking sites. So, do we have groups on Orkut or Facebook? If there's already
one created can we exchange links? Both also offer their own discussion forums,
photos and video systems. So, this might serve to work as Tanmoy's idea as well
enables more visibility for this group.
warm regards,
------- Pradeep Sun Mar 16, 2008 12:27 pm