Some Free Internet Resources for Teaching and General Research
La Salle Graduate Religion Workshop – June 26-30, 2000
listserves: Nicenet
A
listserve is an email discussion group.
After subscribing, you will receive all messages from everyone subscribed
to the list, and everyone will receive the messages that you send to the
list. Listserves are useful for
scholarly dialogue and as a component of classes, especially for students
reluctant to speak in front of others.
The archives for the Pauline Studies listserve Corpus
Paulinum can be searched or browsed online.
] Nicenet has listserve and bulletin
board features. An online bulletin
board allows those with web access to post and read messages. In addition, Nicenet allows teachers to post
documents such as syllabuses and required readings. When I used Nicenet a couple years ago, I was disappointed by how
swamped the system was, often not permitting me or my students to access the site.
] Those with a dedicated server
can install the free edition of Lyris
listserve software for lists with up to 200 subscribers.
Internet
access: NetZero
Full
Internet access includes email and the worldwide web, i.e., the component of
the Internet where data is stored and retrieved.
web page
space: Xoom,
Spree, and
many others
If
you want to create your own web pages, you can use specialty software like
Microsoft FrontPage or the “save as web page” feature in Microsoft Word 98 and
2000. There are tons of commercial and
“freeware” programs available for web page construction. Once you’ve
constructed your web page, you can post it at Xoom,
Spree, a
school or business “server,” or any number of other free servers.
chat rooms: available through Xoom and elsewhere, e.g., mine
For
small groups, a chat room can be useful out-of-class discussion forum. Participants log into the room, and then can
type messages which are displayed instantly.
web-based
email: USA.NET,
Hotmail,
and many others
There
are many free email account providers on the web. These accounts are useful for those with an email account for
work, but not for other matters; or for those with web access through work but
no email account through work.
non-web-based
email: Juno
For those without full Internet access already, web-based email isn’t useful. For those who cannot or do not want to pay for monthly Internet access, but who have a modem hooked up to a home computer, Juno provides free email service. A shortcoming of Juno’s free email service is that attachment files cannot be received.
Internet
Lingo
http: hypertext transfer protocol (precedes most web addresses to let the browser know what to look for)
ftp: file transfer protocol (precedes some web addresses that have files to download)
HTML hypertext markup language (computer code in which many web pages are written)
URL uniform resource locator (the web page address)
web browser: usually Netscape or Internet Explorer, a browser is a program that allows one to navigate the Internet and view web pages; both Netscape 6 and IE 5.01 are available for free download online.
search engine: a web-based program—e.g., Yahoo!, Excite, WebCrawler—that scans the Internet to find what you have specified; I recommend the multi-search engine Dogpile, which searches through most other search engines. See also my Search page, which can be a good start page to set on your own web browser.
Assistant Professor of Theology
Reading, PA 19607-1799