Well, almost. Sometimes someone is not where their phone is. If that person is not near you, long distance charges can become substantial. Finally, we do not all function on the same schedule. It might not be very convenient for someone to attend to your needs at the time you call. The mail does not seem much better. It is cheaper, but a lot slower. At least the mail will wait for the person to arrive and to attend to your needs. But, when you are in a hurry it can take forever. There has to be a better way to communicate — and there is.
It is called the Internet. And it is no accident that it was the academic community that took the Internet out of the hands of the military/defense contractors and eventually opened it up to the world. It is a great way to communicate. It is fast. It is cheap. It is reliable. It is convenient. That is why 20 million Americans are using it now, and that number is expected to go to 60 million in the next couple of years.
Electronic mail, or email, as we Internauts call it, allows you to communicate with individual people around the world. Discussion groups or discussion lists allow you to communicate with groups of people around the world. A single message, sent one time, to one address, is delivered to everyone who has subscribed to that list. Any — or all — of them can respond to your message.
Psi Beta has established a discussion list to meet the communication needs of members, advisors, and the Psi Beta staff. The purpose of the Psi Beta discussion list is to allow us to communicate — to help build a “Community of Chapters” — in much the same spirit in which colleges were originally established to build a community of scholars who could conveniently discuss scholarly things.
Subscription is free, and not at all difficult. All you need
is Internet access and an email account. To join, simply send an
email message to listserv@vm.tulsa.cc.ok.us
stating: Subscribe PSIBETA YourName (YourStatus) (YourSchool). Your
status might be Member, Advisor, or Staff. When I subscribed, my
message read:
Subscribe PsiBeta John W. Nichols, M.A. (Advisor) (Tulsa Community
College - Metro Campus)
It is important to note that all of this must go on a single line
in order for it to be read properly. If necessary, you can abbreviate
and/or leave out nonessential information. For example, to permit
it to go on one line, I could shorten my subscription message to:
Sub PsiBeta John Nichols (Advisor) (Tulsa CC - Metro)
Now that I have subscribed to the Psi Beta discussion list, I can send a message to everyone on the list by sending it to PsiBeta@vm.tulsa.cc.ok.us and they will usually receive the message within minutes.
Messages might involve:
This is definitely a better way to communicate!