Introduction

If you are brand new to Email Discussion Lists, the second half of the article Introducing Email should provide a solid footing. For input on the basic skills involved in joining and participating in Email Lists, use the Email List Checklist.

Background

One of the tools used for developing online communities is the email list (you will also see these referred to as "mailing lists", "discussion lists" or "listservs"). To see why email is a particularly good medium for supporting online communities, read Why Email?

By using different metaphors, email mailing lists can be used for various purposes. When the metaphor is a discussion, lists can be a way of connecting people with a shared interest. Discussion lists provide a high level of interactivity and as long as lots of diverse people belong to the community and participate, the list can be used as a source of professional development. There are literally thousands of lists on the Internet but they are not necessarily online communities.

The VECO community uses the voced-coord list as its main community building device and vehicle for communication.

Lists of Lists

Lists are used for different purposes. There are many "lists of list" on the Internet. Have a look at the following

Australian Education lists can be be found on the oz-TeacherNet site

Ozlists is an index of general Australian lists indexed by category

Liszt (as in the composer) is a comprehensive list of lists that often include reviews or background information.

EdNA has a list of education based discussion lists organised into categories of school teacher, school leadership, community, higher education and VET.

Recording the traffic on a list - List Archives

While discussion lists provide a high level of interactivity, one disadvantage is that a new subscriber to a list does not necessarily know what has gone on previously. There are also times when members may want to revisit a discussion or a thread. The traffic that occurs on a list may be saved in the form of a text file. This list archive may then be made available on the WWW.

One example of list archives is the Oz-TeacherNet Forum which archives those lists hosted by Oz-TeacherNet. These archives appear as monthly logs and can be sorted by date, sender and subject

Another archive collection is hosted at the EdNA site.

and includes a search option.

The archives of VECO email lists can be found at http://rite.ed.qut.edu.au/cgi/lyris.pl?site=veco.

By searching the archives, you can gain a sense of the culture of a given list, what is acceptable, who are the people, what are the topics of discussion etc.

Lists and their Webs

VECO community (voced-coord email list)

The VECO community began with the voced-coord email list. The VECO website has evolved to play the dual roles of supporting the online activities of the general community and special focus groups, as well as organising and archiving the information that is shared and developed.

Preemie-L Mailing List

This is an excellent example of an online community. The website has evolved to record the collective wisdom of the online community through the collaborative efforts of many of its members.

Online Education Group

This website acts as an information archive to support the online-ed list. The list delivers a weekly paper on a topic related to online-education plus some editorial information and calendar of events. A comment from the list manager indicated that although people were very keen to receive the weekly postings, there was very little interest in the web based forum that was available for discussion.

trdev-aus list

trdev-aus is a list for those interested in training and development with an emphasis on the TAFE and higher education sectors. The website supports the online activity and includes relevant links to other sites and to resources.