Introduction to PHP

I understand your concern, Jade. We'd definitely keep these forums for group discussion among the students and co-ordinators. The Google Groups suggestion would pertain to a space where section specific content could be separated from the general discussion. I agree it's an awkward solution, though, because it does demand we have separate places to check and post.

Maybe if we contact the P2PU administrators, they can help us by creating separate forums here so that we can do it all through this site? I think that would be the best solution, and it was something we thought we'd be able to do as admins. I'm not sure how easily the P2PU platform and theme would support that, though Drupal, the underlying CMS, is more than capable.

Thanks, Roger.

Yes, Chaun, it's definitely something I've been thinking about. I do hope that it wouldn't discourage people from attending the meeting, though, since I think that's quite important.

I appreciate suggestions about useful services and technology. WebEx is a pay service, though, so it's not something we can really make use of. I'm looking instead at using a Skype plugin on my computer to record the meetings.

Yes, you’re in my section, Joe.

You can also click on a meeting time on the table on whenisgood.net, and it’ll show you your local time. You’re quite right, though, that’s 7 AM for you. That’s rough! I wouldn’t want to get up at 7 to run the meeting! It’s really not proving at all easy to find a common time that is possible and convenient for all participants. Of now 16 respondents, only 8 listed themselves as able to make that time, and that’s the best time that week. Yikes.

This is why I think we may need to look at moving people between sections or to group leaners by timezone.

My preference at this time is to use the P2PU.org Big Blue Button server for meetings provided it’s implemented sufficiently at this time, which I think it is. I believe it supports both people with mics on voice and people without them sending chat messages from their computers. This also raises an issue re: recording meetings. If communications are split between audio and text, as they likely will be, it isn’t immediately obvious how to record all of that together into a useful information stream (including putting the chat messages in the same time context as the audio discussion).

My temptation is to simply do a screen capture of the whole thing with the audio track. That might have its own issues, though, since it would have to be VERY high resolution to include readable chat. But I might do that and then offer it for distribution through BitTorrent to keep the demand on my outgoing bandwidth down. Alternatively, we could simply have some of our participants take notes in a format that can easily be accessed by all (TitanPad).

I’ll check with the other facilitators about their plans and see if they have any suggestions.

Supported.

You did? I'm going by whenisgood.net, where you've indicated that Sunday the 30th is good for you. Hopefully, everyone understood that you paint the times in green that are good for you. The fact that it was a time when you were available was used in determining that would be the date for the first meeting.

Please note that in order to limit our communication channels and try to keep all of this to something reasonable, I am now using the Nabble forums exclusively. We have a main forum there and a subforum for our section as well.

Our Nabble forums: http://bit.ly/intro2php

Will you be able to make it to the second meeting (since I can't find a meeting time that works for everyone) Monday @ 2 AM GMT?