Howard, I was one who was not able to access the chat room last night and had a thought I wanted to run by you. Have you any experience with Paltalk? (www.paltalk.com) I belong to a very large Yahoo group that uses this site for its meetings as they need to have more structure than a regular chat room. The only requirement would be speakers or headphones since it is a voice/type chat room. A lot more can be covered in a one hour meeting when a lot of it is speaking instead of typing. Also, people raise their hand and the admin calls on them in turn to post or ask their question or speak or type to the group. Sometimes other people pop into the room to disrupt it but the assistant to the admin immediately upon realizing it is a non-member of the group can stop it and things run very smoothly. Once the room has been saved in your Favorites it is very easy to access when it has been opened by the admin. I simply log onto Paltalk and go to My Favorites and click into the room for the meetings. I don't know anything about being the admin for a room so I don't know the particulars but across the top of the room is where the topic is displayed and also a link back to the main group page on Yahoo. A reminder on the rules can be stored and automatically posted by the assistant as people join the room. I think it even 'whispers' it to the new people if the assistant chooses to do it that way and it doesn't appear to all the other people in the room. I find it very organized for a meeting or having a speaker with questions afterward. This group saves speaker meetings and posts them online but I have no idea how they do it. You probably wouldn't have a transcript to post unless you typed it up by listening to a saved meeting. I found that there were a lot more people in the voice meetings than in the typing meetings. Probably because a lot of people don't type well and would rather speak or listen.
Jan
Howard said
06:07 PM Jan 25, 2008
We might try that down the road. But first we are going to try something we should have tried already since we have the capability.
With our current Chat Room, we can do a "moderated" chat, where the participants can submit questions, but they don't appear on the main screen. They go to a moderator and then are forwarded to the person answering the questions.
Each question is then displayed and answered on the main screen. This keeps everyone from "talking" at once and "typing over" others.
I hadn't used this yet since I haven't tested it and I've needed others with expertise to chime in. But we may try it for the next one.
Jan and GC said
07:47 PM Jan 26, 2008
That sounds good. Haven't been to a chat like that before but always willing to try new things! :)
bjoyce said
08:02 PM Jan 26, 2008
Having been in a couple video conferences where we had a variety of strong accents I have to reserve judgement on how well paltalk would work. With text chats the transcripts are also small files and searchable.
Jan
With our current Chat Room, we can do a "moderated" chat, where the participants can submit questions, but they don't appear on the main screen. They go to a moderator and then are forwarded to the person answering the questions.
Each question is then displayed and answered on the main screen. This keeps everyone from "talking" at once and "typing over" others.
I hadn't used this yet since I haven't tested it and I've needed others with expertise to chime in. But we may try it for the next one.