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The Internet and Glossary
Introduction
Glossary Introduction This course uses the tools available on the Internet for managing discussion and carrying on conversations. 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 conferences, articles, and books (such as we will do with the essays ). They engage in continuous email, mail-list, or blog conversations over the Internet. 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 via email messages. 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 relatively short communications, usually no more than two or three screens long. If we have many complicated ideas to express in email, we generally break them up and send separate messages. This format comes 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. Less formal than a memo or letter but 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 what we write. 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, and most of us find it helpful to use it. 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 uniformed opinion are easy, but contributions that improve the quality of a conversation are much harder. University issues often touch on highly controversial subjects, but academic discourse must always assume the good faith of all participants and focus on the issues not on the personalities of those who hold opinions different from or identical with our own. In academic settings we seek conversations that focus on logic, on reasoned argument, on data, and on analysis. It does not matter what brand you use (an Apple Macintosh, a PC running some version of Windows, a computer with Linux or a variety of Unix, or an Internet enabled mobile device). Whatever computer you use requires the hardware to connect to the Internet via a network connection (computer lab, residence hall, cable modem or telephone-based ADSL, wireless carrier, Wi-Fi network, dial-up modem) with access to an Internet Service Provider (ISP). UMass Amherst UMail accounts connect to the campus ISP through the Office of Information Technology UMail program. 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 or the Internet Explorer browser that comes as part of the Windows operating system. Mail Client: Mail 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 free client called Thunderbird; Windows comes with Outlook Express, 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's UMail is a webmail client. Different email clients and varieties of webmail have different features that make people love or hate them. 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.
Accounts: All students need an account that gives access to the Internet through an ISP or the UMass Amherst Office of Information Technology UMail program. Commercial dial-up, broadband, or wireless services can also provide relatively inexpensive email/Internet accounts, often accessible from all over the world. Gmail by Google is free. Students participate in our class discussion list through an Internet email account from one of these sources. If you have an email account or connect to the Internet through a provider other than UMass Amherst, you may not be able to reach some of the materials the university subscribes to. This is true especially of the journal files in the JSTOR archive. To use these materials, and other library subscription based services, you will need a UMaccess account. The library has a page describing this option for accessing research databases restricted to university users. Writing to the Class--Writing to Individuals We have two ways we can exchange messages. When we write to the class to comment on the discussion topics 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 to the class and distributes it to every 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 instructor receives a copy of the messages sent to our list, and only class members can read or send messages to our list. The class list has its own name: JVL-L. We can put the address of this list into the address book in the email client as: JVL-L@history.umass.edu When we send mail to JVL-L@history.umass.edu it goes to every one of us in the class, and shows the author of the posting. Note that the "L" is shown upper-case to remind us that it is not the number "1". Internet address do not actually care about upper/lower case. When you write to the instructor or to any other individual in the class or anyone else for that matter, and you do NOT want to have this message go to everyone in the class, send the message to the personal address of that individual. To write the instructor, for example, send the email to my personal email address: lombardi@umass.edu. These messages only come to me. Web pages often have an entry that looks like this: mailto:lombardi@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. I use email to talk to individual students when they have specific questions about the course, and students can use email to me 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 JVL-L@history.umass.edu address. 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 time logged on and participating, but to use this technology effectively, we need to log on 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 Monday evening. GlossaryEmail: 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 conforms 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 at their ISP sites. An account with the username lombardi, provides the first part of the address the computer uses to send mail directly to 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 umass.edu or student.umass.edu or a similar name as its address. My username is lombardi, and I have an email account on a server named umass.edu so my address for email is lombardi@umass.edu. Computers also recognize various aliases, so in my case email sent to lombardi@chancellor.umass.edu will end up in my account as if the email had been sent to lombardi@umass.edu. 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 write back.
Entering addresses for an
email list follows the same conventions as for an individual. In
our case the listname is JVL-L which is also the username
for the list's email address. The computer address for this list is
history.umass.edu which gives us: This class has some special requirements for the email we use. First, while many email programs will allow fancy enhancements, our list does not process these well and not everyone can read them. You should probably set your email client to use Plain Text. Second, the list will not accept any attachments to your email. The reasons for this are various. Sometimes, people will send email using a client and not realize that the client sends the email first as a plain text message and then as an html attachment. This makes the email files we manage unnecessarily large. On other occasions, people will send an attachment to the list without realizing that it contains a virus of some variety. By rejecting all attachments we 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 lombardi@umass.edu. When the list software filters out either html or attachments, it may not tell anyone, it can just happen. Home page: This is the location of the first page in a series of related pages connected by Internet links. The home page appears when the browser reaches the start of a web site. For UMass Amherst, and many other major sites, the home page has a URL that looks like this: http://www.umass.edu/. This university home page provides links to many other home pages and sites at UMass Amherst and elsewhere. The home page for the class site has a URL that looks like this: http://courses.umass.edu/lombardi/edu07/index.html. Generally speaking, when site names appear in web page documents we call them links, and if we click on a link, our browser will immediately display the new page referenced in the link. 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. 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 members to the list. In a public list anyone can subscribe. Many references to lists appear on the Internet. HTML and HTML tags: HyperText Markup Language (HTML) refers to a standard series of tags or special characters that browsers use to display the contents of a web page correctly. Centering, formatting, fonts, colors, columns, tables, and similar text and graphics elements depend on HTML tags for their appearance on the web page. Tags begin with the less-than symbol, followed by a code such as U for underline, and end with the greater-than symbol. The tag for underlining would appear as follows: <u>underlined text</u>. It would display as underlined text on the web page. Some email clients offer an option to use or not use HTML in email messages. It is best to not use HTML for our class comments via email because not every email client can read HTML, and the list manager is set to not recognize HTML codes. 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 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 the 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 the Internet. The standards include rules for naming computers directly connected to the Internet (all of which are registered). For example, a name for an Internet-connected computer at UMass Amherst might be as follows: www-unix.oit.umass.edu. (The standard tells us that www-unix is the name of the specific machine, oit is the subdivision of the large organization to which this machine belongs, umass is the institution that manages www-unix, and edu identifies umass 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 demand for unique names. International naming conventions are not uniform. Many other countries use the last item for a country designator (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 UMail or Gmail, and student information systems such as SPIRE, are examples of this kind of Internet-enabled service. ISP: Internet Service Providers operate businesses that provide access to the Internet. Access requires a physical electronic connection to the Internet, and most individuals do not want to spend the time and money required to become directly and permanently connected to the wires that are the Internet. An ISP has a computer and other hardware to connect to the Internet on one side. On the other side, they have communication hardware that allows users to connect over the telephone system or use other means such as cable TV wires, telephone-ADSL connections, or wireless networks to connect their personal computer to the ISP. The ISP then connects the user to the Internet and maintains the connection until the user disconnects. While most ISPs charge for this service, the cost is much less than the cost of maintaining a direct connection to the Internet. Users connect to an ISP by any one of a number of ways. The personal computer can have a modem that plugs into the phone system. The computer will dial the phone number of the ISP. The ISP has a modem that answers the phone and negotiates an electronic connection between the personal computer and the ISP computer. Once this is done, the ISP computer simply passes the browser or email program's commands on to the Internet and passes back the Internet's responses to the browser or email client. Other faster alternative connections, called broadband, involve institutional networks or wireless links such as exist at UMass Amherst in offices, classrooms, and residence halls, connections maintained by cable companies (cable modem), or high-speed modem connections though phone lines (ADSL), or using cell-phone wireless systems. Some apartment complexes and hotels also have direct connections to an ISP using high speed digital lines or wireless links. Users also find wireless high-speed or broadband connections available at coffee shops and other commercial or municipal locations. Sometimes these connects are free and sometimes they require a fee. Commercial ISP's charge a fee for their services for connect time. The cost of commercial connections varies depending primarily on the speed of the connection with broadband accounts costing more than slower connections. UMass Amherst maintains a free ISP for faculty, staff, and students under the name UMail to which the campus community can connect either through broadband on campus or dialup off campus. OIT: The Office of Information Technology manages the campus network and most of the computer connections to the Internet for UMass Amherst. It operates the primary ISP for the campus. OIT supports a wide range of computing services, but for our purposes it is the home of the computer that serves as the host machine for our email list management software and our email ISP provider. The UMass Amherst computing environment is complex, and students interested in its resources should start at the computing home page. 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 require a special program for your computer and browser called the Adobe Acrobat Reader. This program is free, and it will work with Mozilla/Firefox, Internet Explorer, and most other browsers. The PDF reader also works as a stand-alone program that can read and display a file stored on an individual computer in PDF form. Printing: Although web pages exist for viewing on-screen, many people want to print web pages for reference purposes or for easier reading. Internet Explorer and Mozilla/Firefox in their most recent versions print well, and both programs have print previews that show what the browser will print on the page. Always preview before printing, because the appearance, size, and number of printed pages may not match what the browser shows. When printing, it is good practice to not only preview, but also to print one page first to be sure it prints properly, and then print all of the document. Finally, some web pages print better in landscape mode than in portrait mode (11" wide 8.5" high rather than 8.5" wide by 11" high). Protected Sites: Many locations on the Internet require a password or authentication before accessing the content of a document or web page. This class, for example, has private, password protected pages restricted to members of this class, and most of the readings are in an electronic reserve that requires the class username and password. The university subscribes to a number of academic services or databases that put material online, available only to students, faculty, and staff of subscribing universities. These sites authenticate the user by checking to see if the request comes from a subscribing university. If the user's ISP is not the UMass Amherst ISP, the service may not recognize a legitimate user. In this case, when accessing these databases from off-campus, the library has a process for individual authentication at: outside access. Outside Access to Library: The Library will usually request a username and password when users access an electronic database or e-journal from a computer outside UMass Amherst through another ISP. This ensures that people who use expensive resources in are members of the campus community. Instructions for accessing these resources are on the Library website: outside access. The username and password acquired with a UMass Amherst computer account gives access to these resources even connecting to the library from some other computer network anywhere in the world. Site: Every location on the Internet is a site and has a standardized URL that identifies the site. A site may be as simple as one document or web page on an Internet-connected computer or as complicated as the many web pages that belong to the Amazon.com, IBM, or Microsoft sites. Sites are composed of Web pages and other machine-readable materials, each page of which has a unique URL. URL: The Universal Resource Locator or URL gives a standard address for Internet resources. Every individual web page, for example, has a unique URL which permits the browser to find that page. URL's often appear in web pages to refer to other web pages; the browser reads the URL and goes to the page, wherever its location in the world. A URL has the following general format:
The meaning of this URL is as follows:
The URL is unique for this page. There are other conventions that identify different types of Internet documents or pages or locations, but the pages that the browser uses are, for the most part, identified by a beginning code of http: and an ending code of .html. Other pages will end with .htm (equivalent to .html) or .pdf for different types of documents that the browser can display. When the URL appearing on a web page is live (meaning it will connect to the computer referenced and display the page), it will usually be highlighted in a different color. By clicking on that URL (called a link), the browser will retrieve and display that page. The following web page URL is a link, and it will display the home page of this class site: http://courses.umass.edu/lombardi/edu07/index.html. Web: This is often used as another name for the Internet, but the web really refers to that part of the traffic on the Internet that produces pages that can be seen with a browser. Browsers are sometimes called Web browsers because they search throughout the Internet for pages that can be displayed. In conventional parlance the web is known as the World Wide Web, and the initials WWW stand for the materials that displayed using browsers on computers connected to the Internet. Often the home page of major sites have an address of the form http://www.umass.edu just like the UMass Amherst home page.
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