An e-mail account is necessary in order to subscribe to a listserver. In order to subscribe to the OT Pediatric Listserver, for example, you need to send an e-mail message to majordomo@dartmouth.edu with the following text in the body of the message:

subscribe ot-peds

Once subscribed, you will begin receiving e-mail from the group. The e-mail received will be from other individuals who are also subscribed and who wish to post a message to the entire group.

When you receive a message, you can respond by posting a reply. In most cases, you will want to reply to the entire listserver (using the "reply" feature of your e-mail program), so that everybody can benefit from your response. However, you can instead respond privately to the person who posted the message, because his e-mail address will be shown in his message.

Besides reading and responding to other people's postings and replies, you are free to post a new message or question to the group yourself. In other words, if you have a specific occupational therapy-related question, you can post your question to the listserver and hope for a reply.

In summary, listservers are discussion forums in which people with similar interests communicate with each other. Even if you do not choose to post questions or comments yourself, you can still benefit and learn simply by reading other occupational therapists' comments, questions, and responses.


Newsgroups

A newsgroup is somewhat similar to a listserver. However, Usenet newsgroups do not exchange messages using e-mail; instead, messages are posted to a very large "bulletin board" that anyone can read.

There are many, many newsgroups on the Internet that are specific to particular interest groups, professions, and so on. For example, there is a newsgroup that is devoted solely to the profession of occupational therapy. (Even though this newsgroup is mainly intended for occupational therapists, anyone on the Internet is free to read it or post messages on it.) You can post questions and comments, send replies, or just read what occupational therapists have to say. Even if you do not want to post messages to the OT Usenet newsgroup, you can still learn a lot from simply reading the discussions that go on.