Issue 12, Fall 1996

William A. McEachern, Editor

Teach-Econ List

As mentioned in earlier issues, the Teach-Econ discussion list was established by Jim Barbour at Elon College to focus on teaching economics. Because the list is unmonitored, much extraneous material goes out, including multiple confirmations and some off-the-wall messages such as a request for charitable donations. One active participant sees all issues through the eyes of Henry George. Compounding this content noise have been technical difficulties that shut down the server from late 1995 early 1996. After the restart, traffic dropped considerably, from an average of 314 messages per month in 1995 to an average of 111 messages per month in 1996.

Though there are still some useful discussions on the list, a variant of Gresham's Law appears to be operating: unhelpful messages drive out useful discussion. The manager is now taking a slightly more active role to limit the subject to teaching. You can subscribe to Teach-Econ by sending an e-mail message to majordomo@majordomo.elon.edu. The text of the message should be limited to "subscribe tch-econ" on the first line and "end" on the second line.

Messages for Teach-Econ since 1993 have been recently archived by Bob Parks of Washington University in St. Louis. This hypermail archive includes the most recent traffic along with annual totals by subject, author, and year. Before you sign up for Teach-Econ, you can sample discussions in the archive. Even if you don't join the list, you can visit the archive periodically and check out the buzz for the most recent week or two.

Top                                                                                                                                                                                          Next