The Internet and Glossary

Introduction
Computer | Browser | Mail Client | Accounts | Writing Email | Schedule

Glossary
Email | List Manager | Internet | OIT
PDF | Protected Sites | URL

Introduction

This course uses tools available on the Internet for managing discussion and carrying on conversations. When we first began teaching this course about two decades ago, the Internet was relatively new and many colleagues and students were still unsure about the various terms and tools, especially as they changed so rapidly in the beginning. Now, everyone is reasonably engaged with the many Internet based tools. Nonetheless, sometimes, for those of us of a certain age, it helps to have a primer that explains some of the utilitarian elements of Internet activity. Most students know all that is described here, but from time to time a few may find this primer of some value. Today, scholars, teachers, researchers, students, and administrators engage in continuous conversations that involve personal interaction (such as we will have in our class meetings). They use formal written communication online or in the printed form of conference proceedings, articles, and books (such as we will do with the essays ). They engage in continuous email, mail-list, text message,or blog conversations over the Internet. They connect through social networking sites such as Facebook and carry on almost permanent real-time electronic interactions through technologies such as Twitter. Their lives appear in the electronic cloud through endless indexing of publications, cataloging of video through YouTube, and re-postings of news articles and obscure institutional reports.

Where once academics wrote extensive letters to each other over long distances and considerable time, today we write shorter much more frequent commentaries delivered almost instantaneously. Our students and probably our faculty colleagues have less patience with information provided through dense text media and show a preference for short, summarized information, video formats, and snippets of one kind or another. Today's students have a much greater range of information at their disposition than yesterday's print-dependent counterparts, but they feel less obliged to remember the details of many subjects since they know they can acquire instant information on any subject through an Internet tool like Wikipedia. The search engines of Google or Bing among others will lead them to specialized websites on practically any imaginable topic. We may like or dislike these evolving communications styles, but the students, faculty, and staff of our universities have these tools available and use them constantly.

Our class uses many of these tools, but most importantly we focus on email, although other forms of interaction are effective as well. Each form of communication has its own style and conventions designed to enhance understanding and create a sense of community. Email such as we do for this course depends on medium length communications, usually no more than 500 words long. If we have many complicated ideas to express in email, we generally break them up and send separate messages. This format comes originally from the physical limitations of the computer screen and the relative inconvenience of scrolling up and down through long email messages. Email style takes some practice; it is a cross between a memo and a telephone conversation. Although less formal than a memo or letter and more formal than a phone message, we read email as if it were text, not spoken words. We need to write carefully so our readers will understand what we mean. Jokes and other humor written as if delivered in person often does not play well when read on screen. If we think our comments amusing, we need to reread them carefully lest our readers misunderstand our intent.

Although email appears as quasi-conversation, we engage it as the written word, and while we easily accept casual styles, we do not appreciate truly bad spelling and punctuation. Email need not be a polished formal text, but almost all email clients have a spell check. If people form impressions of us from the quality of our speech, they also judge us on the quality of our written words.

Courtesy and respect for others provide the basis for effective communication, electronic or otherwise. In our class we have a special obligation to learn how to talk about university issues in ways that contribute to our understanding rather than demonstrate our ruthless critical spirit. Criticism and trenchant opinion are easy, but contributions that improve the quality of a conversation are much harder. University issues often touch on highly controversial subjects, but effective academic discourse requires the good faith of all participants and focuses on the issues not on the personalities of those who hold opinions different from or identical to our own. In academic settings we seek conversations that focus on logic, on reasoned argument, on data, and on analysis.

As cyberspace continues to evolve we will see more and more variants on electronic communication. While tracking these developments are of interest to academics and to managing universities, they are not the subject of this course. We use email and primarily text-based web materials not because they are the most sophisticated (they are not) but because they reflect the linear, text-based functions that still drive the research university. There may come a time when we all exist in some form of virtual, visual space, in the cloud, but for now, we still live by the written word.

In the items that follow we provide some simple definitions of computer and Internet basics. Most students today know all these things and much more, but from time to time some of us benefit from a reminded of the core mechanics of the Internet that we use so extensively every day.

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Computer:

It does not matter what brand or style of computing you use (an Apple Macintosh, a PC running some version of Windows, a computer with Linux or a variety of Unix, or a smart phone as an iPhone or an Android based device). Whatever computer you use requires the hardware to connect to the Internet via a network link (computer lab, residence hall, cable modem, wireless carrier, Wi-Fi network) with access to an Internet Service Provider (ISP). UMass Amherst email accounts connect to the campus computer system which serves as the ISP for people working on-campus.

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Browser:

A browser is a software program that uses the connection you establish with the Internet to browse through the many places or sites connected to the Internet. Many browsers exist in the market but most people use the free Mozilla/Firefox, Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome or the Microsoft browser that comes free with any Microsoft based PC. Smartphones include browsers that have a significant subset of the capabilities of the full-featured computer browsers. Most websites can be viewed on smartphones but some present materials that have not yet been adapted to effective viewing on these smaller devices. Smartphones do email well, even if composing an extensive message can be a challenging experience on some of the miniature keyboards. Most of our students have both smartphones and laptops, and most will bring both to class.

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Email Client or Program:

Email clients send and receive electronic mail, keep track of addresses for people you write frequently, and perform other housekeeping services to manage your electronic mail. Mozilla has a very sophisticated free client called Thunderbird; Windows comes with Outlook, Google provides Gmail, and various service providers have their own clients. In addition, most ISP's now have competent email clients through what is known as webmail. UMass Amherst provides a webmail client called UMail. Email clients and the many varieties of webmail come with different features that make people love or hate them. In addition, most cell phones come with email clients that can access most email systems.

When using email clients to send mail to a mail list manager such as we use in this class, it is helpful to observe some standard practices.

1. You should not use email that includes pictures or other attachments. Many mail list managers do not handle these well.
2. You do NOT need include a copy of the message you are answering with your email to the list. Everyone on the list has already received this email. When you respond to a class member's email post to the list, you only need to respond back to the list. Everyone in the class will get a copy.
3. Use an email account that shows your real name along with whatever email address you have. Otherwise, we will have to try and remember what email address is you. Some addresses tend to be rather cryptic. Always sign your name to everything you write.

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Accounts:

All students need an account that gives them access to the Internet through a commercial ISP or the UMass Amherst network. When accessing UMass Amherst resources while on campus, everyone should use the service called Eduroam, which is a login process that not only will connect you to the UMass Amherst Network but also, when visiting many other universities, will also automatically connect you to their networks.

If you have an email account or connect to the Internet through a provider other than UMass Amherst, you may not be able to automatically reach some of the materials the university subscribes to. This is true especially of the database archives for journals and other materials that the library subscribes to on behalf of students, faculty, and staff. To use these materials, and other library subscription based services, you will need to log into the library with your userid and then use the services.

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Writing to the Class--Writing to Individuals

We have two ways we can exchange email messages. When we write to the class to comment on the discussion topics and the readings, and contribute to the conversation, we use our Internet discussion list and our message goes to everyone in our class. A discussion list is simply a software program that receives an email post from one individual in the class and distributes it to every other member of the class. In addition, it does some housekeeping such as maintaining an archive of all our email traffic on the list. Everyone registered for this class and the instructors receive a copy of any message sent to our list, and only class members can read or send messages to our list.

The class list has its own name: edu18-L. We can put the address of this list into our address book in the email client as: edu18-L@library.umass.edu. When we send mail to edu18-L@library.umass.edu it goes to every one of us in the class, and shows the author of the posting.

When you write to a specific individual only, such as one of the instructors, and you do NOT want this message sent to everyone in the class, send the message to the personal address of that individual. To write John Lombardi, for example, send the email to his personal email address: jlombardi@library.umass.edu. These messages only come to Lombardi. Web pages often have an entry that looks like this: mailto:jlombardi@library.umass.edu. When you click on this entry, the browser will usually take you to an email screen where you can enter the rest of the message and send an email to the individual whose address follows the mailto: reference. We use our personal email to talk to individual students when they have specific questions about the course, and students can use our personal email for questions and issues related to the course or anything else. When any of us wants to send an email message to the class, we use the edu18-L@library.umass.edu address.

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Schedule:

Electronic communication imposes its own discipline on everyone who uses it. Messages arrive instantly and we need to answer them within a day or two. For this class, everyone must participate in the discussions at least three times each week. The class structure assumes that everyone will spend the time to participate, but to use this technology effectively, we need to look at our email regularly, read what others have written, and contribute our part to the conversation. It helps if everyone contributes during the week rather than all on the evening or late night before the next day's class!

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Glossary

Email: Also e-mail. Email is electronic messaging that uses standard conventions for addressing and delivering content across the Internet. An email message has three parts: a header, a message, and attachments (documents or other computer-readable files). The header contains technical information about the source and the route the message took from sender to recipient. Except for the addresses of the sender and recipient, most header information is irrelevant to normal users and most mail clients do not show all of it, but when things go wrong, the technicians always ask for the full header.

The most important parts of the message header are the addresses of the sender and recipient. These addresses conform in almost all cases to an Internet standard that specifies a two part address. The first part is the username by which the sender and recipient are known locally by their ISP computers connected to the Internet. An account with the username jlombardi, provides the first part of the address the computer uses to send mail directly to John Lombardi. The second part of the address begins with the at sign @ followed by the ISP's computer address. At UMass Amherst our computer uses library.umass.edu or a similar name as its address. Lombardi's username is jlombardi, and he has an email account on a server named library.umass.edu so his address for email is jlombardi@library.umass.edu. This combination is unique in the world, so no matter where you are, you can send email that will get to the intended person. We can also enter addresses for other people who will get carbon copies of a message, but the most important information is the address of the recipient. When we send messages to someone, our own two-part address will automatically be included in the header so our recipients can know where to respond.

Entering addresses for an email list follows the same conventions as for an individual. In our case the listname is edu18-L which is also the username for the list's email address. The computer address for this list is library.umass.edu which gives us:
edu18-L@library.umass.edu as the email address for our class list. Note that we use edu18-L with a capital "L" so that we remember it is not the number "1", even though with email addresses the computer does not care whether we use an upper case "L" or a lower case "l".

Lists will often not accept any attachments to your email for various reasons. Sometimes, people will send an attachment to the list without realizing that it contains a virus of some variety. By rejecting all attachments the list system also reject the virus. In the event you want to send the class an attachment of some kind, please send it attached to a private email to me at jlombardi@library.umass.edu. When the list software filters out attachments, it may not tell anyone, it can just happen.

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Mail List Manager: A mail list manager is a program that manages a list of subscribers and the messages sent to them. When we subscribe to a mail list, we will receive a copy of all email sent to that list from other subscribers or sometimes from anyone (depending on how the list is set up). The list part of the name refers to a list of the subscribers who will received a copy of every email sent to the list address. Rather than writing a note and making sure that it gets copied to everyone, we write it to the list. The mail list manager distributes this email to all subscribers. When any of them answer back by writing to the list, the response is also distributed to everyone. In addition, the list manager maintains archives of messages and handles other administrative chores. Mail list managers make it easy to maintain an electronic discussion group, and the Internet has many public discussion lists to which anyone can subscribe. The class list, however, exists as a private list. Only members of the class can belong and only the instructor can subscribe to or remove members from the list. In a public list, anyone can subscribe or unsubscribe themselves.

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Internet: The Internet is an endlessly expandable and connected network of computers that exists on a global basis. The Internet is the physical and electronic connections of many millions of computers, but it is even more the agreement about the standards that everyone will use when they connect to the Internet and communicate with each other. As a result of the agreement about standards, every computer becomes part of the Internet when it follows the standards and makes an electronic connection either directly to the Internet or through another computer directly connected to the Internet.

The standards include rules for naming computers directly connected to the Internet (all of which are registered). For example, a name for a site on an Internet-connected computer at UMass Amherst might be as follows: http://library.umass.edu/index.html. (The standard tells us that library.umass is the name of the organization to which this machine belongs, and .edu identifies UMass Amherst as an educational institution.) Other names end in .com for commercial, .org for not-for-profit organizations, .net for other organizations, and .gov for government-sponsored sites. In addition, a variety of other name endings continue to proliferate to meet the expanding demand for unique computer identifiers.

International naming conventions are not uniform. Many other countries use the last item for a country designation (.uk for United Kingdom or .ve for Venezuela). In addition, people use the Internet for many purposes in addition to showing pages of information viewed with a browser or sending and receiving email. The Internet carries data and other commercial and technical information, and many web sites have interactive capabilities that let customers purchase goods online such as e-Bay or Amazon.com, participate in games, or benefit from a variety of services. Webmail services like Gmail, and student information systems like Moodle are examples of this kind of Internet-enabled service.

As a reflection of the constant presence of the Internet in our lives, some arbiters of language have come to write Internet without a capital I. They believe that internet reflcts the common ordinary nature of this enterprise. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and AP news organizations have adopted this practice.

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IT at UMass Amherst: Information Technology services manages the campus network and most of the computer connections to the Internet for UMass Amherst. UMass Amherst IT supports a wide range of computing services, but for our purposes it is the home of the computer that supports our email list management software and our email provider. The UMass Amherst computing environment is complex, and students interested in its resources should start at the computing home page.

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PDF: Many Internet-distributed documents come in the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), identified as files with the extension .pdf as in MyDocument.pdf. To read these documents, users can use a special program for their computer and browser called the Adobe Acrobat Reader DC. This program is free, and it will work with most desktop systems. The PDF Reader DC can also be made to work with various web browsers although most have their own PDF reading software included as part of the browser. The Adobe Acrobat Reader DC is a new version that allows access to remote storage maintained by Adobe (the Cloud). While this is the most recent and advanced reader, PDF's can be read with many different programs and by almost all devices whether smart phones, tablets, Apple devices, or Linux/Unix based systems.

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