This Guide was written as a poster presentation for the Teaching in the Community Colleges Online Conference http://leahi.kcc.hawaii.edu/org/tcon2001 I am grateful to the selection committee for accepting the proposal and offering me the opportunity to collect and to comment upon a number of examples.
Style plays an important role in information transfers. Knowing which style to adopt in which situation takes practice. Part of practicing involves observing what others do. The other part involves remembering what one has observed. Good record keeping is, of course, the key to this process.
This Guide is mainly oriented to teachers and students wishing to explore discussion lists outside of a class setting. The examples are drawn from actual postings.
This Guide is organized on a checklist principle. It uses cross-referencing extensively. The exercises can form the basis of an individual's journal keeping or they can be used as the basis of group activities.
An archive houses the previous contributions to a list. It is well worth taking a tour through the archives of a list. A simple check of the subject headings often reveals much about the habits of subscribers and how well they might thread contributions or replies.
FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions.
A heated discussion sometimes leads to a Flame or two or more.
Discussion lists have audiences. This audience is made up of subscribers. Some subscribers do not post messages to the list. Some of these people remain lurkers. Some of the subscribers who do not post directly to the list will contact other subscribers "off list". Some discusion lists are set up so that replies are automatically directed to the poster of a message and that copies of replies destined for the whole list must be explicitly sent to the list. ( See the Text Encoding Initiative for an example.)
Some discussion lists are open: any subscriber may post at anytime. Some lists are moderated. A moderator can act as a gatekeeper. A moderator sometimes acts behind the scenes to point newbies to a FAQ or to prune long announcements. A moderator sometimes bundles posts by theme or by type. Some moderators also play the role of animator and seminar leader.
Social intercourse is not free. It is an understanding that if you can make demands on other people's time and resources, they can make demands on yours. Intellectual intercourse costs. It demands attention to style and its cross-cultural incarnations.
How much bandwidth can you hog?
How long can you keep
flogging and reflogging an issue that has been thoroughly debated or a
question that has been exhaustively explored?
What kind of tolerance
do you have for postings that are off topic?
Do you insist on
informative subject headings?
How do you react
to poor spelling and grammar? How do you react to someone making it a
habit of correcting other people's posts?
How long can you keep
flogging and reflogging an issue that has been thoroughly debated
or a question that has been exhaustively explored?
Do you use filters?
Do you delete without reading? Should you?
How long can you keep
flogging and reflogging an issue that has been thoroughly debated or a
question that has been exhaustively explored?
What is the appropriate
length of a signature block?
More than an answer. A link in a chain of dialogue. A node in a web of interconnections.
A reply can summarize. It can ask for elaboration. It can acknowledge. It can enrich.
A reply has direction. It may be sent on list to all the subscribers or it may be sent off-list to an individual or a group.
A reply has timing. On high traffic international lists, sometimes the reply arrives before the question arrives. Also, depending upon their software and their knowledge of their software, users can customize the order of display.
Crafters of replies help their readers manage reading conditions, reading conditions which may sometimes be disjunctive. They use the conventions of letter writing. They use salutations and signatures and they are adept at briefly establishing context. They are sensitive to direction (who is being addressed) and to timing (at what point their reply fits into an ongoing exchange). They use this sensitivity and skill to splice threads and to spin new threads.
Good replies serve the organisation of collective memory.
I presume the logic for doing this was that although errors might be more common, they are not that troubling. The error we see is mail sent to an individual when the whole list was the intended recipient. If the setting were changed so that the default reply went to the whole list there might be fewer errors, but they would be annoying to many more people, and potentially embarrassing to the sender. The error in this case would be mail sent to the whole list, when an individual was the intended recipient.
Individuals can and do append to their postings contact information, little bits of ascii art, favourite quotations, URLs.
Messages posted to a discussion list may be grouped by a moderator and so bundled be sent out together with a signature block indicating such information as the location of the list's archive (See Humanist). They can also be added to every single message that is posted to a list (See the XSL Mulberry Technologies discussion list). Such signature blocks can also be appended automatically to messages sent to unmoderated lists.
Signature blocks function much like a calling cards or letter head. Individuals can append their own signature blocks to their postings. Elements of a discussion list's corporate identity can be supplied in a supplied by signature blocks.
Modifying a regular signature block can serve as a callout to mark a transition or a special occassion. The signature block is akin to the credit sequence of a film or the liner notes of a sound recording which also convey information about who, what and where.
Threaded discussions are enhanced by informative subject headings. A subject heading is an first invitation to read the message or pass over it.
Replies sometimes modify subject headings. (e.g.
subject: "Web Search Engines [was HELP!]")
As a matter of netiquette, accurate subject headings help
subscribers organize their reading. Accurate subject
headings help people decide which threads to follow.
They also help with people delete spam since mass mailings rarely contain
subject lines with enough accuracy or specificity to lure the attention of
a moderately skillful email user.
Some posters indicate in their subject headings the type of message they are sending (question, announcement, appreciation, etc.). Subject-conscious posters avoid subject headings that read like newspaper headlines. They refrain from verb forms. They like nouns. They often move from the general to the particular. For example, "Time Zones: impact on scheduling". They are friends of the colon or the dash. They also favour conjunctions like "and" and "or" For example, "Dictionaries: unilingual and bilingual", "Indexes --- by subject or by author", "Archive Organization: date vs thread".
Some high traffic discussion lists, such as the XSL Mulberry Technologies list, have a digest option. The subscriber receives a single message bundling all the posts of the day or of the week.
Subscribers are identified by unique email addresses. Some lists, such as the McLuhan discussion list, offer subscribers a Web-interface for posting. Such interfaces can also process requests to join a list. As well, the interface gives access to the archives: non-subscribers can read postings; subscribers can post replies and new messages. Thus, the discussion list may appear to some subscribers as a news group or as a threaded-discussion board.
You can spin, splice or split...
Read this excerpt from the XSL Mulberry Technologies list guidelines:
Consider how threading is like a filing system.
Credit where credit is due
Short & catchy
Plus info about how to get
further details
Best to pick up a bit of context from the question
Good to generalize from the specific case where possible
A thank you to an individual or a a group
Useful for a varitey of acknowledgements, announcements, answers, appreciations, and questions that need not be broadcast
A good question invites a good answer.