Computer conferencing systems, which developed out of email bulletin boards, are
designed to support text-based asynchronous group and many-to-many communication. The
software includes features to help in organizing, structuring, searching, and retrieving
messages. It allows users to link one message to another as a comment, and to organize
messages in different branches, threads, or topics of a conference. Participants can
easily keep track of who has contributed to a conference and who has read specific
messages, and the conference moderator or organizer can use special commands to define
conference membership, track contributors' messages, structure the discussion, and
schedule the opening and closing of conference topics. Some conferencing systems have
special features that can be adapted to distance education group activities, such as
polling and voting options and features that allow the moderator to change a participant's
conference privileges from read-only to read-and-write. Recently Web-based conferencing
systems have appeared that can be used in conjunction with Web databases and information
resources (see the discussion below on integrated Web environments).
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