Chapter 3 |
3 Communication and discussionWhile the World Wide Web brings an unprecedented amount of information to us, electronic mail brings us people – family, colleagues, friends, peers, experts – and unprecedented opportunities to communicate. In 1854, Henry Thoreau wrote in Walden: ‘Our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.’ Today, with 92% of UK households equipped with that invention, the telephone is indispensable. Electronic mail and video-conferencing are further ‘improved means’ for people to keep in touch with each other. But will we exploit their potential? Its usesOne day, e-mail addresses may be as ubiquitous as telephone numbers… or maybe, as technologies converge, our telephone number will also be our e-mail address. Compared with the capacity required of a computer accessing the World Wide Web, e-mail’s demands can be met by modest equipment such as older computers, and even mobile telephones. As we have seen, text – the raw material of e-mail – travels rapidly on the Internet, so picking up and sending mail can take only a few minutes. Evidence from educational projects suggests that, at present, e-mail may have more benefits for teaching and learning than the more attractive World Wide Web. Learners share tasks, swap data and bounce ideas off each other. Some of this is irregular chatter – a leisurely conversation with a friend or colleague – while at other times schools team up for formal curriculum projects or staff development work. E-mail contact between feeder primaries and secondary schools has helped with induction programmes. A college in the north west found that electronic links with local secondary schools boosted its intake. With local institutions in competition with each other in the UK, it may be that schools and colleges far apart, even overseas, will tend to develop partnerships and collaborative ways of working. Parents are taking to the Internet in order to communicate with their children at university, as e-mail seems to be the easiest (and sometimes only!) way to get them to keep in touch. Teachers report how quickly students using e-mail appreciate ideas about time zones and climates, and how easily they learn about lifestyles in other countries. Language teachers say e-mail adds a valuable new ingredient to their work: for once, learners have a real audience and dialogue is now a more natural concept. As one girl put it, "It makes you want to understand the language." At present, more teachers in further and higher education than in schools have their own mailboxes, where they post assignments to their classes and have their classes file their work back. There is unusual value when learners can reply to messages at a pace they can manage. In effect, the respite allows a more considered reply, which makes it possible for learners to communicate almost as peers with adults and experts. For the less articulate, and that includes language learners, time gap provides a stronger voice. Before using e-mail in the classroom, it is worth trying it for your own purposes. For a first experiment, you might like to use someone else’s mailbox and send a message to someone you know, or even the authors of this book. It does not take long to find contacts willing to share ideas. You will find addresses on education Web pages. Or you can subscribe to a mailing list (see page ) to build up your contacts. For your early efforts it is best to send a short message; reveal little and it will matter less if you get no reply. For administration purposes, education authorities have set up authority-wide mailboxes to improve information flow and efficiency between institutions and the authority. In one city education authority, the chief education officer uses e-mail to congratulate teachers for good work. Institutions with networks can use e-mail for internal messages and memos. Students and teachers can all benefit. Many trivial questions that need only a quick yes or no can be mailed rather than use up precious time at break. A school in Corby uses its internal mail system to organise course teams, circulating weekly bulletins, agenda, minutes and relief timetables to the appropriate staff. Many teachers in the school can dial into the network from outside – called dial-up ‘remote access’ – to deal with their messages. Having such a convenient and efficient way of exchanging information means that people communicate more often and in smaller chunks. For these, e-mail has already become as indispensable as the telephone. Parents, too – although on the whole only academics and professionals at present – are beginning to send e-mails to school. E-mail curriculum projectsE-mail can be useful when news is being made: dialogues with schools in the midst of floods, bush fires or earthquakes have an immediacy that can easily engage young people. Casual encounters can be valuable, but class work more often takes better shape as a formal e-mail project. You choose a theme – interviews about lifestyles, a day in our class, the view from our window or the lengths of shadows. Then you post a request for partners to sign up to a project. Projects can motivate, develop personal skills, and raise awareness of other cultures as well as extend gifted learners. Otherwise onerous tasks, such as exchanging data on acid rain or diet, are greatly facilitated by the convenience of e-mail, which can be speedy enough to allow dialogues of short messages, instead of letters. Ordinary mail (so-called ‘snail-mail’) still has a place. At present, it is the only way to send leaflets, video and audio tapes, hand-written poems, artwork and chocolate bars! Opening a parcel from peers in other countries is still more exciting than clicking on an e-mail box. Tips for successful e-mail projects:
First steps with e-mailFor individual subscribers, e-mail is part of the package offered by your Internet provider, which looks after your mailbox and stores the messages that people send until you are ready to pick them up. On a stand-alone machine, you run mail software that checks your mailbox on your Internet provider’s computer and displays new messages on your machine. Mail software lets you write your mail as well as reply to messages as if you were using a word processor. To save on call charges, you can write messages off line, and later connect to send them. Some call these ‘flash sessions’. A cheaper, even free, alternative can be found anywhere where there is an Internet connection. This is to use a Web site which has individual e-mail accounts. For example, at Schools On Line Web pages, members can send and receive messages from other people in the project. There are also many other places on the Web offering free e-mail addresses (e.g. RocketMail, NetAddress). Using this system, with your mail may come some advertising – as it does with many other things on the Internet which are free. Once you have an e-mail address, what happens next? When you rent a telephone
line, a telephone directory is part of the service, and Directory Enquiries are
there to help too. In Sweden, e-mail addresses are included in telephone
directories. A directory of UK educational ISDN video-conferencing users is
published, but for e-mail in the UK at present there is no single e-mail
directory (partly because some schools would rather not publicise their address
for fear of being flooded with junk mail). Internet providers like RM and
Dialnet and projects like Schools On Line have lists of their schools’ Web sites
and e-mail addresses. To ensure that there is something to read in your ‘inbox’,
you might first send yourself a message, then subscribe to a few mailing lists,
such as IECC (Intercultural E-mail Classroom Connections) projects and
discussion groups like uk-schools, eisp-forum (Educational Internet Service
Providers project)
Handling e-mailE-mail software typically has an ‘inbox’ where your new mail arrives. Here the sender’s name, the message subject and the date it was sent are displayed. There is an ‘outbox’ where your replies and messages are stored until you connect to the Internet to send them. When you collect your mail it is usually erased from the remote mail box, although there is a way to switch off a ‘delete read messages’ setting. The software has an address book which grows as you make new contacts. It lets you make distribution lists so that a single message can go to a group of people. You will find other features normally found in memo-writing – such as ‘cc’ (carbon copy) where all recipients see the distribution list. Another is ‘bc’ (blind copy) – where all recipients receive the same message but do not see who else receives it. Electronic mail can be very fast. In theory, a message can appear on the other side of the world in a few minutes. If you send it to someone with a modem connection, your message stays in their mail box until they ‘dial-up’ to retrieve it. If they happen to be on line when you are, or have a permanent Internet connection, they may sometimes read and reply to messages within seconds. Mail systems vary – some check for new mail constantly, some hourly and some only once or twice a day. With the faster systems, a conversation, if limited in nature, is possible. Despite a feeling that your message disappears into the ether once you click on Send, it is rare for mail to go missing, so you should not need to phone to check that it has been received. Wrongly-addressed messages bounce back from the system within hours, with an automatically-generated ‘Return to sender’ message to explain that it is having trouble with delivery. You can check the address and try again or you can send a message to the ‘postmaster’ asking for help. Every e-mail domain has a postmaster who looks after the mailboxes on that domain. For example, if the address enquiries@becta.org.uk did not work, you can send a message to postmaster@becta.org.uk. More frustratingly, though, (and more often) e-mails simply remain unread in people’s mailboxes because of the effort of connecting and checking to see if there is any new mail. It is like going to the post office to collect letters rather than having them delivered. For a premium, some Internet services let you retrieve your mail using a normal voice telephone. Messages are read out by a computer and you can skip through messages as you do on an answering machine, or if the message is long you can ask for it to be sent to a fax machine nearby! A taste of the future or a luxury perhaps, but the unusual advantage is that you do not need access to a computer to pick up your e-mail. The disadvantage is that it gets even more difficult to escape from work when you want a break! Over time, the mail in your inbox will need pruning. If you need to keep some
messages, the mail program lets you make folders on your computer to organise
them like a filing cabinet. With a shared mailbox you might sort people’s mail
into individual folders. If you keep personal mail on a public system, folder
names such as ‘Atomic physics’ attract fewer prying eyes than ‘Personal’, and
regularly changed, well-chosen passwords which mix letters and numbers also help
because they are harder to ‘crack’.
It is possible to get computer programs that sort incoming mail into folders using a set of ‘rules’ for handling the mail. A message from one person might go to a certain folder, or be forwarded to someone else. The program might check the subject and file it in, for instance, a projects or a discussion group folder. EXAMPLE: MICROSOFT OUTLOOK RULES WIZARD Networks and heavy duty needsSorting mail can also be necessary on networked systems where there are many users, each with an e-mail address. This can be a burden for IT managers, particularly where they use a mail system called SMTP. Here all incoming mail has to be dealt with by the institution and forwarded to the appropriate mailbox. In some schools it is considered prudent to vet incoming, if not out-going, e-mail for younger children. When large numbers of enthusiastic students want to deal with their e-mail at breaks, many messages can be left waiting for the supervisor to check. A program called a ‘mail server’ – essentially a sorting office with its own set of rules – can do this. With another mail system, called POP3, mail is stored by the Internet provider which then takes on some of the management chores. A number of suppliers, such as Research Machines, supply e-mail servers which considerably simplify the task. Multimedia mail and conferencingCompared with the colours and bright lights of the World Wide Web, e-mail can seem very grey. Mail nearly always looks like plain typewriter text headed with lines of text about the route the message took. But this is changing: it is becoming easier to send and receive text with colours, bolding and tables to make messages more useful and conspicuous. In fact, in some modern mail programs the messages appear in the form of colourful Web pages, blurring the idea of grey mail versus Web pages. Mail programs allow you to attach word-processor documents, spreadsheets, photos, audio recordings and entire Web pages to your messages. You can share work with colleagues, while learners can send each other files for comment or for further work, but beware that some multimedia files can be so large that they may jam up recipients’ computers – it is polite to warn them if a file is large. As data transfer speeds improve, sending multimedia, voice e-mail, even video mail will become much easier. Audio and video ‘streaming’ (where the material is played as fast as it is sent) make it possible to use the Internet as a telephone or even a video-phone – that is, in synchronous mode instead of asynchronous e-mail. Software such as Microsoft’s NetMeeting, Iphone, CuSeeM and Cooltalk does this. At present the quality is poor and not all Internet providers support it, but there is the not inconsiderable payoff for you, and threat to telephone companies, that international calls can be made at local call rates – or whatever your connection to the Internet costs. Video and audio calls (or ‘conferencing’) are, however, practical on a campus-wide network system. Here the speed of the system is much faster than over the Internet. In time, Web browsers will include conferencing and telephony features in an integrated environment. There are still some technical hurdles connected with sending multimedia over the Internet. Files have to be ‘coded’ to send them, and sometimes the mail you receive may have unreadable text because your software is not able to decode it. You may on occasion spot the coding system they used, with names like MIME, Uuencode, and BinHex. Better software is appearing as standards for sending files emerge. Microsoft’s NetMeeting not only allows you to talk, but also allows you to work on a document with a distant colleague. The software allows two distant learners to control the screen as they discuss things ‘live’ over the Internet. All it needs are microphones, the software, and a reasonably fast connection. For collaborating on projects which use the same word processor, this technology has much promise. Looking forward, with a video-camera costing under £100 and a very fast connection such as that in use in universities, a discussion can be made very much alive. With an ‘information superhighway’, teaching to a class spread across the world is possible. Today, over 200 UK schools and colleges use video-conferencing over ISDN telephone lines which, while not part of a superhighway, are much faster than ordinary telephone lines. Rather than use the Internet, where data transfer speeds are variable and unpredictable, ISDN video-conferencing uses point-to-point direct connections, just like the telephone. With this a head teacher might speak to an officer at County Hall, staff on different sites could plan courses, a careers adviser might interview a student – all saving unnecessary travel to a meeting. In Wales, Down’s Syndrome children use video-phones for a weekly get-together which seems to help overcome their feelings of isolation. Language learners are using it, too – for example, at Monkseaton Community High School they talk with and see their peers abroad. They would rather use the video link than talk to a French assistant and A-level grades seem to be improving as a result. In the Whitby area, primary pupils call it the ‘picture telephone’, and again use it to speak French. As well as improving their French, the children are observed by their teachers to gain confidence and communication skills. [SHAREWARE TUCOWS.COM] [ MS NetMeeting Internet phone] Mail issuesHuman nature being what it is, some people send offensive e-mail messages. In schools, it can happen quite innocently with a poorly worded message to a school in another country. So, given that your school or college e-mail address is a kind of headed notepaper, measures to ensure appropriate use must be taken. The need for control of learners’ access to mail is discussed in Chapter 5 – for example, it is common to ask learners to be party to a code of conduct. There are machines on the Internet that send mail to millions of addresses daily, so it is likely that you will receive junk mail from time to time. While most of this is harmless, you will find chain letters, pyramid schemes and plenty to be wary of. There are scams offering ways to clear your credit card balance and ways of avoiding drug tests, but more usually it is talk of business opportunities not to be missed. It is rarely worth sending a suitable reply, as often it bounces back unread. But if it gets out of hand, Internet providers’ message filtering software may be able to help. In some cases, if you report the problem, the provider can block the mailers responsible. Schools should consider carefully the implications of giving students individual e-mail accounts. At present, very few schools do this, although all pupils entering secondary schools may in time have their own e-mail address. Reports often tell of time wasting, abusive or hate mail. One school said that some students turned into ‘mail junkies’. The advice might be to run a trial with a select group, perhaps for a particular project, before launching anything more ambitious. It is important to appreciate that if learners are to use mail, you may need to allow extra times for computer access. Despite the theoretical attractions of e-mail, it has to be recognised that people may not use it. Several local authorities have provided schools with e-mail addresses only to find that the amount of traffic is disappointing. One administrator admits that when he sends e-mail to a school he has to follow up with a phone call to check that people have read his message. In one school where all 60 staff have e-mail accounts, apparently only five bother to check their mail. Mailing listsIf we relied solely on e-mail, we would miss a great deal of up-to-date information. There are ways to have information sent to you chosen from the thousands of ‘mailing lists’ on the Internet. In contrast to the system which allows people who send junk mail to find you, you can be put on the mailing lists you actually do want to hear from. Mailing lists act on a ‘one-way, one-to-many principle’ – they send you and many others information but you cannot send anything yourself. They work on Internet-connected computers called list servers, and can be invaluable. Joining one or two mailing lists can be recommended, especially to those starting out. It can make reading the mail more interesting, and occasionally generates an idea. Tastes vary but there are lists that send government press releases, European Community news, Internet news, daily news digests, specialist newsletters, joke of the day and Web site of the day. One mainstream list that is easy to set up runs from the Web pages of the search engine Infoseek. Here you merely click to join a list and choose a cocktail of sport, weather and technology news that arrives by e-mail. Another is Information Society Trends, a fortnightly newsletter published in Belgium and an example of using the Internet effectively to disseminate topical information. Every issue ends with the subscribing information (see below) which every good mailing list should carry: where to find archives, how to join and how to leave. Subscription: www.ispo.cec.be TO SUBSCRIBE: enter SUBSCRIBE ISTRENDS + your e-mail address in the body text TO UNSUBSCRIBE: enter UNSUBSCRIBE ISTRENDS + your e-mail address in the body text GRAPHIC OF MAIL LIST Discussion groupsWhereas with e-mail you read and write to one colleague or a few, and with mailing lists you read information sent to many people but cannot reply, discussion groups on the Internet let you participate in electronic conversations. You might ask how to teach a topic, what people think of an idea or how to handle a problem class. You can also offer your tips, while students can ask for expert advice. Visiting a group is like eavesdropping on a conference with room for different points of view. Those who normally sit quietly in group discussions may find discussion groups salutary: you are judged for the quality of your contributions alone. A discussion group is an interactive, two-way, one-to-many forum. Here you can receive messages and send your own if you wish – or you might prefer to ‘lurk’ and just observe. Clubs, on-line courses and professional groups have on-line discussion groups. They may be closed (for members only) or open to everyone. They may be moderated by a chairperson who ensures that irrelevant messages are not posted, or they may be run unmoderated. The idea is straightforward: people send e-mail messages to a central place where they are stored for anyone to see. For example, a science teacher sends a question about how to do an experiment, another sends in a suggestion a day later, and yet another suggests a different experiment altogether. The time-scale for this interchange is unpredictable – it depends on how often people contribute to the discussion. On the Internet Usenet there are over 20,000 discussion groups called ‘newsgroups’ and many are useful. However, others are offensive, obscene, filled with hate or silly messages and even more are esoteric. Usenet now has such a bad reputation that many Internet access providers simply prevent access to any of them, or at least only to a limited set of them. To get to a group you need to look for words like newsgroup or message board when you connect to the Internet. Your Web browser may even sport a button that presents you with lists of discussion groups. Titles like uk.education.teachers and uk.education.misc yield enough clues to the content. When you see these, a mouse click will open the group, and show the discussion threads. When you find something of interest, you click to read the message and click again if you want to reply to the whole group. If you prefer to just read, that is fine – no one is actually watching. If you prefer, you can send your message just to the person you are replying to – it depends on whether or not it would be useful for everyone to read your contribution. Web browsers are increasingly becoming the tool for accessing all parts of the Internet. For example, you can often get to a newsgroup by typing, for instance, news:uk.education.teachers into the browser location box. But there is other software, called a ‘newsreader’, which is probably more efficient. It presents the list of 20,000 and lets you subscribe to those of interest. It does not lose its list of groups and message threads when you disconnect, and you can mark the threads you want at leisure, connect to grab the messages and then disconnect to read them off line. There are numerous examples of ‘off-line newsreaders’, among them Forte Free Agent, Microsoft News and Mail, Microsoft Outlook Express and, for the Acorn, Ant’s Marcel. Do realise that many of these discussions have been going on for years. The more popular groups publish a weekly digest somewhere on the Web. Checking this is a quick way of scanning the week’s gossip: a search engine should find the page you are interested in. Educational Internet providers and some educational Web sites
In the UK, Mailbase at Newcastle University hosts discussion groups mainly for higher education, but with several useful ones for schools and colleges. When you find a likely list, you send a message to join it. For example, to join the UK schools mailing list hosted at Mailbase, you send an e-mail to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk with the line subscribe uk-schools your-mailaddress. You may receive more mail than you expected, so keep safe any details they send about how to ‘unsubscribe’ (remove your name from the list). One list of special relevance is the IECC (Intercultural E-mail Classroom Connections) where you can receive news of schools and colleges wanting to collaborate on projects and post your own requests. Some on-line
Cranbourne School, Basingstoke, asked for information about European funding sources from uk-schools@mailbase.ac.uk, which elicited valuable answers. The person who asked the question then put the answers together and helpfully mailed them back to the group. This ‘reification’ – as it is called – shows how the Internet can be a repository of expertise and collective wisdom. But even if the theory is fine, no 24-hour-a-day meeting could be interesting all the time. A group can go into a lull, until months later when a definite purpose draws comment from previously quiet members, and it takes off again. Discussion groups can be unmanaged and messy, degenerating into interminable ‘flame wars’ where people with entrenched views (often about the relative merits of Mac and PC computers, it seems!) bounce messages back and forth. Groups are also vulnerable to the posting of answers in the wrong places and indeed posting wrong answers altogether, and can be quick to point this out to offenders – so it pays to ‘lurk’ as an observer in a group before plucking up courage to send a contribution, unless you are very thick-skinned! Irritations aside, groups are unrivalled as media for dealing with daily professional issues. One such group is that moderated by Becta for special needs co-ordinators. All schools must have a ‘SENCO’ but the job entails dealing with a multitude of needs and imperatives. With only one co-ordinator per school, SENCOs can use the group to ask questions, offer information and share expertise in a way that is not normally possible. This group is a good example of how discussion groups can help those whose role is the lone school or college ‘expert’. It may hold the key to identifying which other groups could also benefit. It illustrates how the Internet helps to build communities based on a common interest instead of physical location, such as a need to deal with a tricky curriculum area,. Not surprisingly, people in remote rural areas can exploit this feature of the Internet, but groups even work within a single institution: a closed discussion group can often do much to bring people together. But not every good idea works well or works for ever. If a group attracts little traffic, it does not follow that a new, more focused group will work any better. Those considering setting up a new group might consider these features, which are the conclusions from research into successful on-line discussion groups. While some features are desirable, others – like the first two in the list – are considered essential:
Live discussion or ‘chat’Some discussion areas, (called chat or conference areas) run live across the Internet. When you visit them, you find a discussion in progress. The screen will show messages appearing as people type them in. These contributions are echoed to all present and there may even be a moderator or chairperson who runs it. If discussion groups are akin to notice boards and conference proceedings, chat is more like a live conference. While you can often find transcripts of these conferences, chat benefits from your being there. If you frequent education areas, you will probably catch announcements of times, places and topics. AOL has run successful conferences for teachers, aided by its simple, built-in chat software. Microsoft’s MSN and CompuServe do this, too, on a wide variety of topics. For learners, there is more potential here than actual use. Children, particularly girls, enjoy participating in chats, and some young people with behaviour problems can be motivated by them. Given the right topic, learners may develop their social awareness and feel better able to contribute their ideas in such settings. Just be warned that a frustrating meeting can lead to a display of the wrong kind of language skills. There are many places where chat is happening, and happening now. Unless your Internet provider has software with chat or ‘forums’ built in, you will need special software. First Class has an easy-to-use ‘live chat’ feature; other examples of chat software go by names such as IRC (Internet Relay Chat), Microsoft Chat, and MIRC. For just a sampler, see http://www.wbs.net. Tips for using e-mail
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