Module 2 - Lists

What are the pros and cons of email lists versus discussion boards?

Email Lists
Pros - Good for communicating with an individual, or a group or when you know who you want to communicate with.
Cons - Do not provide immediate answers. Need to attach files or write extensive information

Discussion Board
Pros - Good for discussing a topic with a particular community. Good for communicating with people with an interest in a specific topic
Cons - Does not provide immediate answers. Need to provide extensive information to people. (Tyson, n.d.)

Are there certain kinds of communication or purposes more suited to one than the other?

There are certainly types of communication that are more suited to email lists, or discussion boards.

An example of where discussion boards are more useful is an online disucssions area for a web-based course, such as NET11. The discussion board holds all the infomation for all historical posts, and enables one to easily review old posts, and to contribute to discussions that may be old and no longer active. Thus, with discussion boards, old posts and discussions are still relevant. With email lists, once a topic has been relegated to the archives, most people will not want to continue to discuss the topic and would request that the poster reads the archives before contributing something that may have already been discussed.

Tyson, J. (n.d.)
How Newsgroups Work. HowStuffWorks.com.
Retrieved 17/12/2008 from www.computer.howstuffworks.com/newsgroup1.htm