[Xerte] FORUM or EMAIL

[RonM]

John I admire your enthusiasm here but allow me to share a slightly
different view...

This list has been fantastic for helping the community and especially the
more technical developer community. Most of the help and support is of an
immediate nature where someone has an issue they are trying to resolve and
particularly Julian and Pat but also the community respond in an extremely
short space of time. The speed with which we are able to post questions and
responses via email without having to login to an external site and via pc
or mobile device is what makes this so useful and successful. Actually I'll
correct that it's Julian and Pat's commitment to this list which makes it so
successful followed by the speed of use followed by the community support.
It's the Nottingham team's list and unless they say let's all move over to
the forum and abandon this list I suspect it ain't gonna happen! ;-) 

An online forum is unlikely to be as easy and efficient as this. The notion
of separate areas of a forum to which people can subscribe or not subscribe
is nice in theory but also likely to dilute the immediacy and efficiency of
responses with the less technical users missing useful discussion in one
that they haven't yet subscribed. An area for newbies is also a nice idea
but it's the more experienced users that are likely to have the answers to
newbie questions so again the support may be diluted if the experienced
users don't subscribe to that area. This list does have an archive, is
searchable and just as usefully if you wish you can keep copies of the most
useful threads by keeping the emails received. For me this is my dynamic
snippets area where I can get to those snippets when offline as well as
online without having to go outside of my email client or login anywhere
else.

We also have the http://jiscmail.ac.uk/xerteforteachers mailing list which
as I've mentioned previously will compliment but not replace this list and
aim to support the teacher and less technical community and already has a
large membership.

I'm not saying the forum won't become useful in time but for now I would say
that these lists work for the size of community we have and you seem to be
suggesting that everyone should move over to that forum and not use this
list. I don't think that's likely to happen or be beneficial so although I
can see you're keen to contribute to the growing community I would suggest
this list is here to stay for the foreseeable future and should remain the
first point of call for any xerte questions.

Regards
Ron

-----Original Message-----
From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
[mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of John Doubleday
Sent: 07 March 2010 08:55
To: 'Xerte discussion list'
Subject: RE: [Xerte] FORUM or EMAIL

Thanks Dave and David,
As a new member of the list and Xerte I need to talk with people who are
interested in newbie issues but as I gain experience I would like to access
the more experienced users. A forum with different sections is a great way
to do this.....email lists are not easy to navigate or search. Thats all I
am trying to say. As a very small group we need to have only one 'forum' to
communicate. When things get bigger (thats if you want to) then more
specific forums may need to be formed, like Moodle forums:
http://moodle.org/course/


John Doubleday
Digital Teacher
http://www.digitalteacher.com.au
0407045834
Skype: john2day


-----Original Message-----
From: xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
[mailto:xerte-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of David Goodwin
Sent: Sunday, 7 March 2010 9:28 AM
To: Xerte discussion list
Subject: Re: [Xerte] FORUM or EMAIL

Dave Burnett wrote :
> 
> 
> John, the list is archived and eminently searchable.
> 
> http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/community.htm
> 
> You could simply block the xerte address in your mail client if the volume
gets too much to handle.
> 

I'd have thought a better option would be to either enable 'digest mode' 
(one email per day or whatever, rather than 100) or to unsubscribe....
(I'm assuming this list is powered by mailman, and therefore does
digest mode... I've not looked)


David.
-- 
 David Goodwin                          Pale Purple Limited
 Office: 0845 0046746                   Mobile: 07792380669 
 http://www.palepurple.co.uk            Company No: 5580814 
 'Business Web Application Development and Training in PHP'
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