You open your e-mail account and find a chain letter, urging you to "send this to seven people and you will be lucky in love." Without thinking, you hit the forward key, type in the e-mail accounts of seven friends, and push the send key. If you've done this to get lucky in love, even if no money or goods were involved, you have unwittingly breached a law banning chain letters.

E-mail has become an indispensable form of communication on campus. But along with the high-tech come hazards. The etiquette of the computer age was the focus of "Just a Joke? Ethical Issues in Campus Computing," one of many discussion sessions at Educom '96.

Along with a dorm or office key and a course schedule, new faculty and students on campus are routinely issued an e-mail account. With it, they can discuss assignments and send and receive messages from colleagues, friends and family. But this form of communication is particularly susceptible to abuse, said the "Just a Joke" discussion leaders, Sharon Roy and Gail Kaiser, both from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, N.Y. Roy is the associate director of academic computing, and Gail Kaiser is the Internet postmaster there.

E-mail is particularly vulnerable to abuse because it is impersonal. You don't have to see or hear the person to whom you are e-mailing. You don't even have to know them. And e-mail is easy to use. Your e-mail account can be accessed through numerous channels -- the university , a former high school, or through an acquaintance.

Chain letters can be one of the more trivial forms of e-mail abuse, Kaiser said. Far more serious are cases of harassment, including sexual harassment. This can involve unwanted advances or lewd comments. In all cases that Kaiser has been privy to, it was a male who was the harasser. That is not to say that only men commit these acts, she said.

Students also use their e-mail accounts to buy or sell things through the Internet. In many instances, the students don't receive the product for which they've paid. In such cases, there is nothing that the postmaster can do except advise the victim to call the police or take the case to small claims court.

In any case where e-mail users feel harassed, they should speak with the postmaster at their school, said Gail Kaiser, Internet postmaster at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The postmaster will decide whether the claim has merit and decide what action needs to be taken. A first step might be for victims to tell the harasser that they wish these advances to stop. Then the postmaster or university discipline (if the harasser is on-campus) may warn the e-mailer to stop. If those warnings donŐt work, the case can be handed over to the police.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Postmaster Dave Millar deals with e-mail abuse in much the same way that Kaiser does. The policies on e-mail harassment at Penn can be found at www.upenn.edu\isc on the web.

Penn's chemistry department demonstrated to participants of Educom'96 a bold step it is taking this year in the teaching of introductory chemistry. The chemistry faculty has made Chem 101 more rigorous by re-inserting math concepts that had been removed from the chemistry curriculum in the past 35 years. But at the same time the faculty has implemented new technologies that should make learning chemistry easier.

Thanks to a $500,000 grant from the provost's office, Room 102 in the Chemistry Building has been equipped with a big screen and a high-resolution video projector connected to a computer. Lecturers are now using this equipment to provide visual demonstrations of the math concepts they cover in class. The idea is that students will improve their understanding of the math used to express chemical behavior with the help of visuals such as movie clips, graphs and drawings.

In addition to this, students can get an advance outline of the day's lecture from a Web page. The outline frees students from having to take notes in class and allows them to concentrate instead on understanding what exactly is the chemical behavior being discussed in class.

Return to Compass Features for October 22, 1996