About Penguin Talk
Welcome to Penguin Talk, the PTO’s experimental discussion system for members of the Burns Park School community!
If you aren’t registered, you can’t see the comments and you’re missing the good stuff!
If you are joining for the first time, please click the “Create new account” link at left below. You will be able to log in as soon as your account is approved.
If you did not use your real name as your user name, please sign your posts so that we know who is speaking!
This system uses “discussion forums” to help organize online conversations into discussions of particular topics. PTO volunteers will create main topics for discussion, and we invite everyone to pitch in with their ideas and responses. All users can create “topics” (discussions) inside an appropriate forum “branch”, and if there isn’t one, just ask.
The forums are organized like an upside down tree, with the main “trunk” representing big categories, the smaller branches representing specific discussion topics, and under that the branches and leaves of the discussion as it evolves. Responses to the discussion topics are called “comments” in this system, and you can also reply to a particular comment to create further branches in a discussion.
Our system is based on a web “content management system” called Drupal, and we want to see if it fits the needs of our community. Please let us know what you think!
Comments
About Penguin Talk
Thanks, Steve, for creating this. I think there’s great potential here for sharing ideas, questions, etc. Is there any moderation involved? Does every parent have his/her own unique password? If so, is that generated through the database? I’ll be eager to see how this can be used by us. Great name, Penguin Talk!!! :)
Moderation
Yes, moderation is/can be involved. We can set things up however we like. At the moment, there are four kinds of users:
I thought that we’d have key PTO volunteers be moderators, who could create new discussion topics (including at popular request), and parents, faculty and staff would all have accounts and could post comments and replies at will.
What do you think?
moderation, but only in moderation
I’d be happy with a system that had a modest
amount of moderation, so long as it didn’t get
so onerous that it was hard to post messages
or hard to engage in discussions.
It’ll be nice to have a way to talk with people
from all over the school!
Moderation in all things...
I quite agree, Ed. The main difference between this system and the email lists (which currently require positive approval from a moderator) is that someone can jump in after the fact if there is a problem, and it still mostly takes care of the problem.
That’s why I thought it was reasonable to have a filter where you had to be connected to the school to get an account, but once you did you could post replies to anything. I thought it was wise to have a smaller number of people responsible for creating forums and topics, but I’m open to alternatives. I’d love to be able to just give everybody accounts, and perhaps there is some under-the-hood way of doing this using the back-end MySQL database. Thoughts?
bulk user import looks possible
Steve, I did a little digging around drupal.org and found this:
http://drupal.org/node/31940
which says it’s a module to allow for bulk import of users. There’s other comments elsewhere on the site that talk about doing it with not very many lines of PHP code that someone has already worked out.
Thanks
Thanks Ed! I went to look at it, and I’ll see what it looks like to install. This would be a great help.
Accounts
Glad you like it! I’m still working out the details, but there seem to be two options: we can create accounts for everybody, or we can invite folks to sign up for accounts. In the second case, a temporary password is generated automatically and emailed to them. Accounts created by request are held pending administrator approval, so that could be a way to make sure that only legitimate people get accounts.
Right now, there is no tie-in to the PTO database. That would be a fair amount of work (I think) and it seemed unnecessary. But maybe…?