Introduction There are many ways of using communication technologies to support learning.
One approach that has been extensively used is an electronic mailgroup. This is a system in which by sending an e-mail to a common address all participants who form the group are sent the message. There are no particular limits to the size of a mailgroup and examples exist of groups of less than 20 participants and ones of many hundreds of members. The initial applications were mainly to support groups of researchers and scholars who were separated by distance but shared areas of interest. Initially they were specialist discussion forums but have now developed to cover a vast range of topics and groups.