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Diversity in On-Line Discussions 183

1. There were actually over 350 messages in total. However, the mes-
sages from the two instructors were eliminated from these analyses, since
they primarily used the system for “broadcasting” (i.e., one-way transmis-
sion) of information relating to the in-class discussions.
2. The Subject: information in e-mail messages ends up not being
very useful. It is often not indicative of a message content, especially when
people simply use the reply function to send messages without revising the
Subject: line.
3. For some of the Asians, there was a problem in using the English
language.
4. Visual inspection of the messages revealed that most of the
messages sent were only a few lines long and that there were far fewer
longer messages. Given the paucity of data in this latter category, a simple
classification scheme was most appropriate. Since messages less than half
of a page consisted of little more than the header and a few sentences,
messages were classified as long if they were more than half of a page
in length.
5. For both figures, the amount shown in Week 11 represents the
number of individuals who never adopted the listserv.

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