Heil öll,

We, the teachers, have had a long talk on how best to arrange this group.
Here’s a description on how we want to apply the media available to us:

www.hi.is/~haukur/norse.html:
This site will contain all the data needed by the student, lessons,
solutions
and supplementary articles.

Private posts to us:
Students should send their solutions to us privately, if they have time to
do so. This is useful for us to be able to gauge our students’ progress.
Currently, students with knowledge of English only should send to Haukur,
those with knowledge of German or other Germanic languages should send to
Óskar. Please do not send to us both. We will try as best we can to reply
solutions with feedback.

norse_course at http://chat.yahoo.com/:
The "voice chat" will be operated every now and then (depending on your
interest); the chat group will always be "norse_course" and our log-in
"hr_oskar". Here the students can hear us speak Modern Icelandic or
pronounce individual sounds in Old Norse. Reading fluid ON text is not very
easy for us, so our attempts should not be taken literally. This should be a
productive way for the students to improve their pronunciation, or at least
share their skills with other students; all are therefore encouraged to
attend. We will probably have separate schedules for America and Europe
respectively, to accommodate time differences.

The Links section:
From here students can access various sites we have deemed useful to the
course in some way; the home page above is also available from here. Other
links are all optional.

The Polls section:
Regularly, we are going to want to know your opinions on various things.
The polls are of course optional, but your opinions are important to us,
so please answer if you can.

The Calendar section:
Various events such as the voice chat are noted here.

The Files section:
This will contain the lessons and supplementary articles in *.doc, *.txt,
and *.wpd format. That should be useful for students with limited access to
internet, who can then download the files for easier use.

The Database section:
Unused now and will probably remain so.

The Messages section:
Since all other sections cover well all that the student needs for the
course, this section will from now on be more open to chat, small talk,
linguistics debates, and just about anything. The main practical use will be
the occasional announcement from us (clearly marked in the subject).
Students interested in more advanced linguistics and all kinds of language
debates should be able to catch some here. Lessons won’t be directly
posted here anymore, only announcements of new lessons having arrived
(see File section and home page). This section will therefore also not be
edited nearly as much as before.

NB: Because of the change in the role of the Messages section, we now *urge*
list members to change to "No Mail/Web Only" mode (i.e. to receive no posts
to
your e-mail, but rather access posts through the Web when you feel like it).

Go to http://www.egroups.com and sign in. You should see a page where
you can modify your options on receiving mail from the group.

Since we have now strongly recommended that you do this, please don't ask us
to control the small talk anymore; the small talk need not enter your e-mail
at all, so it doesn’t do any harm :)

And one more thing; Haukur is going into exams for a couple of weeks so
he will be less available and slow to answer messages. Óskar will be in
charge for now:)

Verið sæl,
Óskar and Haukur