At the start of the project, few of the participants had much previous experience of videoconferencing, and the majority of the UK participants had little experience of using the Internet. By contrast, most US participants were used to using Internet email and the Web. Most of the US schools were fully networked with high bandwidth leased-line Internet access available around the school.
Electronic mail is of course an essential technology for everyone involved in the project.
Students use it to communicate between videoconferencing sessions, teachers use it to plan and evaluate work, and consultants use it to administer and support the project. The ability to copy messages to third parties, memo style, is invaluable as a quick and easy way of keeping people informed of progress. Listservers can be a good way to start electronic communications in a project like this, but they can quickly become burdensome, as people receive more and more mail that isn't relevant to them. It's best to move people on to direct emails with local circulation lists as soon as it's practical. It was a valuable way to stimulate interaction between groups of students.