Date: Fri, 23 Aug 1996 12:09:45 -0600
From: Hans Ehrbar <ehrbar-AT-marx.econ.utah.edu>
Subject: Groucho, Rosa, Hans



I have had pseudonym mailing lists about marxism with my students here
at the University of Utah, and they were very fruitful.  The first
time I offered it, Chris Burford and Steve Keen moderated it, and Lisa
was one of the students, and it went beautifully.  The students really
regretted that the list would be disbanded at the end of the quarter
and they wanted to continue.  People like Scott Marshall were
listening in, until the traffic got too much for some of my outside
observers.  At a more recent time, Kevin Cabral was fielding some
of the students's questions.

Malgosia and I have been hashing out the technical details
in the past few days and I think we are ready to go forward with
offering such a list through spoon, so that others, who are not
my students, can join also.  My students do not get grades
for their submissions to marxism-intro, but they must make a minimum
number of submissions as a requirement.

But since I am the one who is grading them on their homework
assignments on a different list, I do not like to be the moderator.  I
am conversing with the students on a different list in which we go
through Marx's Capital paragraph by paragraph.  You wouldn't expect it
but the students are lining up for this class.  One of the reasons is
that there are only very few courses taught by email in our
University.  And the students get a lot of individual attention.  My
colleagues are making jokes of the kind: "why does the information
superhighway have a red line in the center?"  It is very time
consuming for me, much more than the average course, but I consider it
time well spent.

I am always inviting outside observers to this Capital
course.  Anyone who is interested please contact me.  Last time I
did it, Michael Perelman, the founder of Pen-L and a marxist
economist, joined me with his 5 students of his own capital class.
He said they were amazed how high the level of the discussion was,
and they all got a lot out of it.  If Mike gets permission to
teach his class again, he will be with us next Spring again.


To repeat: if you are interested in taking part as an outside observer
in an advanced undergraduate email course about Marx's Capital at the
University of Utah, which goes from September 25 until December 4,
please contact me at ehrbar-AT-econ.utah.edu There is no charge and you
will not get credit for it, but the University allows me to have
outside observers because this enriches the discussion.  For maximum
benefit you should have the time to do the assignments.  I will offer
the same course also in January - March 1997 and April - June 1997.

Regarding marxism-intro, please stay put, there will be an
announcement eventually.  If you would like to be a moderator in
marxism-intro, please let me know.  I don't think there is harm done
if there are several moderators with slightly different versions of
Marxism.  But if this is the kind of thing that interests you,
the newsgroup soc.politics.marxism would be the place for you to
go right now.


By the way, I am still working on a report of my "moderation"
of the marxism list here.  It will come.

Hans Ehrbar


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