Paul Halsall/Fordham University
HSRU1300: Sect.7 /Fall 1996
Introduction to Medieval History
Class Participation & Email Discussion
Class participation is an important part of this
course. There are a number of ways for you to take part in class,
and all are important:
Do your reading before class.
Pop quizzes based on the readings will be
given as needed and without warning! If you have read the texts,
ask questions about them or refer to them in your class room remarks.
For some class sessions there are more readings than I expect
one person to do - and in these cases I shall assign readings
to various groups of students to report on.
Use Email Discussion
Frequently students feel under pressure
and tongue-tied in class. Contributing comments via email gives
you more time to think about what you want to say. Each student
should contribute at least two email comments/questions/discussions
each week. These can be short or long. What I am looking for is
real thinking about the issues. You are especially encouraged
to comment on my class remarks and other students' comments. Attack!
How to Contribute Email Comments
Some of you have commercial email accounts,
but these instructions are for users of Fordham's Vax MAIL program.
In these instructions, type exactly the commands
as given in capital letters.
- Using "MAIL
- When you log in, invoke the MAIL utility
by typing
MAIL
You will be presented with all your new mail which you can read
by hitting the ENTER key.
- Sending Mail
- Address
- You will then be presented with a request for
an address. Within Fordham all you need to type is the name of
the email account you are sending mail to. For this class you
send it to me at
HALSALL
[To send mail outside Fordham is slightly more complicated. You
must type:
SMTP%"<emailaddress>"
for instance, to send mail to me at a commercial account I have,
you would type
SMTP%"HALSALL@BWAY.NET"
By the way "SMTP" stands for "simple mail transfer
protocol"]
- Subject
- After typing the address, you will be asked for
a "Subject". Be descriptive in describing the comments
of your note or comment. Press the ENTER or RETURN key, and begin
typing your message. You must press ENTER or RETURNat the end
of each line.
- Sending what you have written
- Once you have finished writing, you can
either cancel the message by typing "CTRL-C" [ie the
"Control Key" and the "C" key at the same
time], or send the message by typing "CTRL-Z"
- Address for this class
- Send class comments to me at HALSALL and
I shall distribute them to all other students. [Students using
outside mail accounts send comments and notes to
HALSALL@MURRAY.FORDHAM.EDU]
- To send mail and be able to edit the text:
- One of the problems of just typing "Send"
is that you can only type one line at a time, and after you have
pressed return, you cannot edit the line. This means that I, for
instance, often end up sending email with typos.
But it is possible to make your messages editable. To do this
type
SEND/EDIT
and you will have a screen in which you can move up and down between
lines of text. Once you have finished, you again type "CTRL-Z"
to send the message.
- Replying
- Very often you can avoid having to type
addresses and subjects, merely by typing
REPLY
while you are reading any message. When you do this, you will
invoke the line editor as when you type SEND. To invoke the screen
editor type
REPLY/EDIT
A series of messages under the same subject is called a "thread"
and enables you to follow an argument when you are receiving messages
about differerent subjects.
- Commenting on Mail You Receive
- One of the best things about email is
that you can take the whole text of the email you receive and
tear it apart line by line. To do this type:
REPLY/EXTRACT
This command will invoke the screen editor as with "REPLY/EDIT",
but will also incorporate all the text of the message you are
replying to. The usual procedure is to delete [on the screen editor
presseing "CTRL-J" will delete a word to the right]
all the mail header information and all the parts of the original
message which are not related to your reply. It is usual to marke
this quoted material by placing angle brackets down the side,
as follows
>This is an example of quoted text
>and this is the next line.
At Fordham you have to manually type these brackets.
[Anyone who has a commercial email program such as Netscape will
know that the program does this automatically.]
- Quitting MAIL
To leave the MAIL utility type
QUIT
- These instructions should get you started, After
you have used them a few times, it will all seem very
easy!
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