Glossary
Attachment: A document or graphic that is connected to a piece of e-mail. By sending a graphic or piece of text as an attachment rather than in the body of the e-mail, its original formatting can be preserved. Any file linked to an email message is an attachment. Many mail packages use MIME encoding to attach files. At present, it is not possible to send attachments through the I*EARN newsgroups. If you would like to send an attachment to your I*EARN project group, you will need to do so through direct e-mail.
BCC: Short for blind carbon copy, a copy of an e-mail message sent a recipient without the recipient's address appearing in the message. Most e-mail clients include two fields labeled cc and bcc. When you enter addresses in the bcc field, addresses do not appear in the message. This is useful if you want to copy a message to many people without each of them seeing who the other recipients are.
Bookmarks: A tool that allows you to mark your favorite Web pages so that you can quickly return to them later. You may want to bookmark the I*EARN homepage for easy access http://www.iearn.org
Bounce: When you send e-mail that comes back marked undeliverable. This could happen for any number of reasons-the address may have changed, a server may be down, etc. If you are mailing to an I*EARN participant and this happens, please notify iearn@us.iearn.org.
Browser: a browser is your interface to the World Wide Web; it interprets hypertext links and lets you view sites and navigate from one Internet node to another. Among the companies that produce browsers are NCSA Mosaic, Netscape, and Microsoft, as well as commercial services like CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online.
Bulletin Board System (BBS): A computer to which multiple users can send messages for the purpose of conversing or exchanging files and information. Special interest groups and professional organizations often set up BBSs.
CC: carbon copy.
Conference: You will oftentimes see the phrase "online conferences" as a way of describing the networking system used to connect I*EARN participants worldwide. Internationally, participants connect together in a variety of ways. In the US, the term "conference" can be considered a synonym for "newsgroup."
Domain: A set of nodes on the Internet whose names share the same last two or three parts. For example, "iearn.org" is the domain name for the network of I*EARN. Domain names that end with "edu" are for education organizations; "com" for commercial entities; "net" for networks; and "gov" for government, "org" for organization, "com" for commercial.
Downloading: The transfer of files from one computer to another. In terms of the Internet, this refers to the transferring of files from the Internet onto the user's computer
E-mail: An Internet application through which users can exchange messages with individuals or groups of individuals who are also connected to the Internet.
Home Page: The starting point for a World Wide Web site. A home page contains introductory text and graphics on a particular topic, as well as pointers that connect elsewhere. Your school may have set its own site as the your web browser's "homepage." If not, you might want to set I*EARN's http://www.iearn.org.
http: hypertext transfer protocol. The format in which documents accessible on WWW are created. This permits placing and viewing of graphics and hypertext links in the document itself.
IMAP: Internet Message AccessProtocol. IMAP provides a means of managing email messages on a remote server, similar to the POP protocol. But IMAP offers more options than POP, including the ability to download only message headers, create multiuser mailboxes, and build server-based storage folders.
Internet: A collection of all the connected networks worldwide.
Internet Relay Chat (IRC): IRC is a way of hooking up with other Net users to exchange written comments--live and in real time. To do this, you need an IRC client and an IRC server. Once connected to the server, you join a channel, or discussion group, which can include people from all over the world.
Internet Service Provider (ISP) -A business that provides Internet access to customers.
IP-Internet Protocol. See TCP/IP
IP (Internet Protocol) address- A number assigned to each computer on the Internet. Most of the times, you work with domain names, such as www.iearn.org. Whenever you enter a domain name,it is matched to the site's IP number (for example 134.236.123.6) and calls that site. When you connect with others through video-conferencing, for example, you will need to know your own IP address as a sort of phone number at which you can be reached. Or, you can call another site on their IP address to reach another school. Contact iearn@us.iearn.org if you would like help in arranging to use the I*EARN reflector site for CU SeeMe Conferencing with other I*EARN schools.
ISDN: Integrated Services Digital Network. The plain old telephone system doesn't handle large quantities of data, and the phone companies realized this a long time ago. So the ISDN spec was hammered out in 1984 to allow for wide-bandwidth digital transmission using the public switched telephone network. Under ISDN, a phone call can transfer 64 kilobits of digital data per second. But it's not always easy to adopt.
ISP: Internet service provider. Once upon a time, you could only connect to the Internet if you belonged to a major university or had a note from the Pentagon. Not anymore: ISPs have arrived to act as your (ideally) user-friendly front end to all that the Internet offers. Most ISPs have a network of servers (mail, news, Web, and the like), routers, and modems attached to a permanent, high-speed Internet "backbone" connection. Subscribers can then dial into the localnetwork to gain Internet access--without having to maintain servers, file for domain names, or learn Unix.
LAN: local area network. A local area network is a short-distance network used to link a group of computers together within a building. 10BaseT Ethernet is the most commonly used form of LAN. A piece of hardware called a hub serves as the common wiring point, enabling data to be sent from one machine to another over the network. LANs are typically limited to distances of less than 500 meters and provide low-cost, high-bandwidth networking capabilities within a small geographical area.
Listserv: A software program for automating the maintenance and delivery of e-mail mailing lists. There are mailing lists for many different topics.
Login/logon/Logoff-The process of entering and leaving an electronic communications system; access generally requires a user identification code or password (often the user's name).
Lurkers: People who merely read discussions online without contributing to them. Oftentimes, new I*EARN members will start by lurking on the online conferences in order to get a better sense of the various projects. This is a good way to start, but don't be afraid to jump in! If you would like to practice posting messages first, the I*EARN Practice Conference iearn.practice is a great place to begin!
Mail Server: A program that provides access to files via e-mail. In order to post messages to the I*EARN project conferences, your mail server will need to be set under Preferences. If you do not know your mail server address, ask your computer systems administrator.
Modem-A modem is a device that translates computer information into sound and transmits those sounds over conventional telephone lines or that receives such sounds and translates them into computer data.
Mouse-A pointing device that connects to a computer. With a mouse, users can control pointer movements on a computer screen by rolling the mouse over a flat surface and clicking a button on the device. The mouse is also commonly used to define and move blocks of text; open or close windows, documents or applications; and draw or paint graphics.
News Server: A program that provides access to files via newsgroups. I*EARN's news server is <news.igc.apc.org>. See http://www.igc.org to find out more about IGC.
Newsgroups: Worldwide bulletin boards, organized more or less around topics or themes. There are approximately 70 I*EARN newsgroups (conferences).
Online-Being actively connected to a network or computer system; usually being able interactively to exchange data, commands, and information.
POP: Post Office Protocol. The current champ in Internet email mailbox access standards, but its limitations--basically, you connect to a server and download all your messages, which are then deleted from the server--discourage flexibility. Of course, some clients let you leave all messages on the server, and/or refuse to download messages above a certain size. Still, as messages become longer--with multimedia (such as sound or video) objects and the likes--we'll want some flexibility in what we retrieve and when we retrieve it. That's where IMAP comes in.
Post: Just as a message or announcement can be "posted" to a cork bulletin board, electronic messages can be sent to online conferences, thus "posted" for all who have access to the conference to see. When I*EARN members post a note to one of the various project conferences, their message can be read by all who see the conferences.
PPP: point-to-point protocol. PPP is the Internet standard for serial communications. Newer and better than its predecessor, SLIP, PPP defines how your modem connection exchanges data packets with other systems on the Internet.
Scanner:A device attached to a computer that makes a digital image of a hard-copy document, such as a photograph, scanned picture, graphic, map, and other data that are often used in desktop publishing.
Server: The business end of a client/server setup, a server is usually a computer that provides the information, files, Web pages, and other services to the client that logs on to it. (The word server is also used to describe the software and operating system designed to run server hardware.) The client/server setup is analogous to a restaurant with waiters and customers. Some Internet servers take this analogy to extremes and become inattentive, or even refuse to serve you.
Signature Files: Most mail programs allow you to create a signature. A signature is what your e-mail program will place at the bottom of each e-mail message. It can contain your name and any other relevant details. It saves typing the same things repeatedly for each e-mail message.
SLIP: Serial Line Internet Protocol. This is a way to connect directly to the Internet so that programs you download come to your local hard drive and not to your information service provider's. If you have a SLIP account, your computer is actually on the Internet; it's not just a terminal. If you're SLIP (or direct or PPP) connected, others can telnet to your computer too. A control panel called MacSLIP or InterSLIP is used to connect to the Internet if you have a dial-in connection.
SMTP: simple mail transfer protocol. When you're exchanging electronic mail on the Internet, SMTP is what keeps the process orderly. It's a protocol that regulates what goes on between the mail servers.
"Snail mail"-This term is used by supercilious fans of email to describe the regular paper-based mail service. Since the delay between sending email and receiving it can be as little as a few seconds, regular mail seems a lot slower by comparison. A number of different I*EARN projects use snail mail as a way of enhancing their online exchange, sending artwork, photographs, cultural artifacts, etc.
TCP/IP: The preferred method of data transfer over the Internet. With TCP/IP, the sending computer stuffs data into packets and sends it. The receiving computer unstuffs the packets and assembles them into meaningful and useful form.
Thread: Used to describe the way in which topics are organized in the I*EARN newsgroups. When students respond to existing topics on the various I*EARN newsgroups, their responses can be "threaded" beneath the original posting by using the same Subject Heading. For "Subject: Bullies in Schools", a Response would be posted as "Subject: Re: Bullies in Schools" so that it is grouped with the original. This makes sorting and navigating messages much easier.
URL: Uniforn Resource Locator. Basically, the address of any Gopher, FTP, telnet, or WWW site.
Videoconferencing: Takes place when two or more people communicate using video and some combination of audio, text, or graphics. The address of I*EARN's 24 hour videoconferencing reflector site is . If you would like to use this resource, simply e-mail iearn@us.iearn.org so that we can organize to have the site available for your group. The software that many I*EARN members use for videoconferencing is CU-SeeMe (White Pine). You can use CU-SeeMe on the Internet or any TCP/IP network for real-time person-to-person or group conferencing, broadcasts, and chats.
World Wide Web: Also known as WWW or the Web. A graphics-rich hypermedia system that enables you to move from site to site with the click of a mouse, collecting information at every step.