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Allows for communication with a group of people that share a common interest – an online community. At best it provides a great online forum for the sharing of ideas on a particular topic by utilizing a moderator or team that supplies weekly ideas and respond to posts by list members. Some listservs exist mainly to push out messages and information for an organization.
How it works: Basically a “forwarding” service. Mail is sent to a common address like reading@nwteachers.org and then forward to out to members of the list. Some list require a moderator to OK a message before it is forwarded.
Students: A student listserv can be developed for your classroom or for any special interest topic such as novels or clubs.
Parents: Parent listservs might best be used as to push information such as a weekly newsletter or classroom update.
Colleagues: In addition to pushing information districts should make use of listservs to create communities for staff based on curriculum, committee assignment or other need. Examples: Reading, 6th Grade, or Site Council.
Issues: Before starting a list it’s a good idea to consider purpose and vision. This can extend to thinking about what topics will be allowed and what topics will get tabled. There should be at least one person that is in charge of the list and can respond to problems or put out fires as they occur. Sometimes dominant personalities can be overbearing and smother the exchange of alternative ideas Most listservs allow only members to post to the list. Some lists can add 30-50 messages a day to your inbox. Most lists support only text based email. Sending HTML email to a list can often create garbled and hard to read messages.
Terms:
- Lurker: people (often new to list) that read messages but don’t contribute by sending or replying to ideas.
- MajorDomo: Most listservs are automated. This is a computer program that handles membership and mail receiving and forwarding. To subscribe or get removed users typically send mail to a majordomo@yourserver.com with the word subscribe or remove.
- Digest: This takes all the list’s emails for a day and sends them in one email message.
- Resources:
- More Info and Links http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr062.shtml
- Yahoo Groups http://groups.yahoo.com
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