Administration Guide

6. The Email Class Discussion Forum

The email class discussion forum for 134.101 is based on the email section of the Mass-e-web system. It is hoped that email will initially provide an enhanced way for you to interact more with your peers as well as with me. (Any personal email to me should continue to be sent to me or to the secretary.) Any feedback you can provide, both informally during the course as well as the formal course evaluations, will be greatly appreciated and taken very seriously.

There will be no set schedule of discussion topics. Nor am I in any sense the "moderator" or even "facilitator" of the forum. I am a subscriber, so like you I will be getting the emails circulating about. But for the most part I will be taking a "back seat" approach, allowing the group to interact and discuss things on its own. When interesting issues crop up in lectures or tutorials - especially when some concepts and arguments are proving difficult for me or others to get hold of from Sober - then I will usually post an email to this effect. When a discussion on the forum seems to be heading off on a tangent, after a while or upon invitation I will stick a gentle oar in. Likewise when the discussion is developing an important insight - which is far more common. In short, the forum is a bit like a tutorial group for extramurals (and internals) with a very heavily sedated tutor. It is your forum. It is not another soapbox for me.

Participation in the email discussion group is strictly voluntary. No material in the discussion group is examinable, nor will participation or lack of participation in the group be marked.

This discussion group is meant to help you do well in the course in three ways [I quote what I am told to quote]:

Provide a means of increased interaction with your peers, which research has shown can have a positive impact on leaning.
Regular participation in the discussion group helps increase motivation for finishing readings in a timely manner (because otherwise you can't fully participate in the discussions).
Increased exposure to the material should increase retention.

To get the best use out of the forum, I would suggest you at least begin by planning to access the discussion group at least three times per week. As always, be respectful of others' time, contributions, and opinions; neither rant nor abuse. Email discussions are regarded as similar to verbal communications in a group setting, so people should feel free to ask questions, sound out others about their ideas, ask for help, etc. (An excellent discussion of "Netiquette" can be found here).

Subscribing and unsubscribing

To subscribe to the list send an email to: majordomo@massey.ac.nz. Leave the subject line blank and in the body of the message put:

subscribe 134101class end

Once subscribed, you can then send an email to the forum by using this address: 134101class@massey.ac.nz. You will receive any other email posted to the forum automatically whenever you download your email from your server (XTRA, Clear, MRA, Voyager, IHUG etc.). When you simply reply to any such email, remember that you are replying to the return address, which is the forum, so your email will go out to everyone else too. Send personal stuff to the person not the forum; their address will be somewhere in the headers of their message.

If you do not wish to participate at any time, then you can choose to unsubscribe yourself from the discussion. You should also unsubscribe yourself from the list at the end of the semester. If you don’t, then you will in effect have subscribed yourself to the same forum for when the next 134.101 class uses the list again; the result will be lots of unwanted email messages in the future.

Unsubscribe by sending an email to: majordomo@massey.ac.nz with the following in the body of an otherwise blank message:

unsubscribe 134101class end

Further information

For more information about using the mailing list you may also like to download this guide, which is provided by Massey University Computing Services. It is in PDF format and so requires Adobe Acrobat Reader to be viewable. You can download a free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader from here.

Information regarding a wide range of Massey web and email services may be obtained by sending an email message to the following address: masseweb@massey.ac.nz. This message should include your full name, Massey ID number and the courses you are taking this semester. Please write in the subject line: Request for information on masseweb services.

For general questions about email and web use at Massey contact:

Andrew Chambers OTS Consultant, Directorate
CUES
Phone: 06 350-5379 Fax: 06 350-2268
Email: masseweb@massey.ac.nz

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