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Category: Announcements
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Improving Site Content and Features Has Been Was A Low Priority
Since March 2010; But Is Medium Priority Since March 2019

The WebLearningTools.org (WLTRes) web site, once my #1 priority to develop since about 2007, became my lowest priority of my three Joomla sites to continue developing since the Great Recession started in 2007-2008 and that recession, even with two 'successful years' of Obama as President 2008-2009, became much more probably irreversible by 2010.  Since March 2010 my first priority site to develop was the CAGreenIDEAS.org web site, then the USGreensIdeas.org web site.  Since May 2012 and because the USA political climate had turned "hard right"in the 2010 mid-term elections; the radical-right GOP now dominated both houses of Congress and would "round-file' pretty much every liberal bill Democrats and Obama would propose to Congress to pass and become law,  Because I switched my voter registration from Democrat to Green Party when it became a legal California party in 1991 and because these 'hard right' political turns in Congress and in more US state legislatures, in 2010 I became an IT volunteer for the Green Party of California IT Working Group.  I tried to help them for a few years to properly plan and develop 1+ of their official, test and development web sites being setup notably their CAGreens.org LIVE site repurposed on a 'more modern' feature-rich and more easy to maintain Drupal 7 (D7) CMS site of the same name. "We" in the IT group at that time had limited success and by 2013 the GPCA turned to renting a NationBuilder.com voter information site while keeping the D7 CAGreen.org site to provide party volunteers, staff and members information about our party, state issues and some of our candidates.  The emerging problem: "Too Many Chiefs" with too little professional IT experience were in the GPCA IT group. 

Therefore as of 2010 and to-date I continue to deeply apologize to all distance learning educators and web site technicians and web site programmers for taking this huge tangent from developing my WLTRes site "better" since March 2010.  I apologize to you all who have been highly interested in distance learning for not having "something better to show you by now."  For what other reasons has this been so?

Read more: Improving Site Content and Features Was Been A Low Priority Since March 2010

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Category: Site News
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WELCOME new users!

As of Friday February 08, 2013 (13.02.08), the WLTRes web site has 18 total registered users, almost all are new registrations in the last 3 months. These names may start to appear in "group lists" under the Community Builder menu in the left-hand-side (LHS) Main Menu.  For the site visitors, only a first name or a last name will appear in group lists.  The site visitor will need an account and have to log in to the WLTRes site to see a bit more information about registered users on this site.

As "public" or "site-wide" or "exclusive-to-group-members" user profile information becomes available to site visitors and to logged in site users, please take some time (1) to add or update your personal information and interests and your professional information (education, knowledge, experiences).  Also (2) please browse through the Community Builder member lists to which you have access to "get to know" your virtual neighbors.  Note what, if any, common interests you have that might lead you and other "like minds" to collaborate using this WLTRes web site.  For that is...

  1. The #1 purpose of this site: to facilitate collaborative groups in ways that help them develop "better" distance learning materials (and web sites) and help them improve the availability of free distance learning they create and provide others.  But, if necessary, WLTRes and the work-products from the WLTRes members should provide very low-cost access to high-quality education to as many needy people as possible, copy-right-free, people of all ages, ethnic background, geographic locations in-the-world, whatever their previous education backgrounds.  NOTHING produced on WLTRes or related "Web Learning" sites should be for-profit, period, full-stop.
    "Our target students" could be people already in a brick-and-mortar class or in another online class, people preparing to take a class or people who just want to revisit a subject and learn more about it... perhaps with a little (or a lot of) online help when they need it and without much to any cost or trouble to find it, get it and use it to their satisfaction.
  2. The #2 purpose is "providing useful information" to educators, to site owners, stakeholders, distance learning site-designers and site-builders, and to the necessary computer technicians.
  3. The #3 purpose is to "help working groups with a 'presence' on this WLTRes site with distance learning site and course content project planning, project information sharing, and with project executing.  All such projects should provide free "progressive" (a.k.a. liberal) high quality education to the group's target audiences.

See the Projects and Project Management Details menu item in the Main Menu for a few sample or suggested projects of interest, at least of interest to me, JGW, in 2011 and 2012. I'll be updating mine.  Some of you may create and be revising yours...  Others may volunteer to be "test-students" for courses or lessons prototyped or in-development on this or related "Web Learning" web sites. We'll see what the "site membership" wants to do and how they want to do it...

Other News:

  • Very much more "user information" is going to be captured (voluntarily) on this site in the week starting February 11, 2013. This is because as of 13.02.08 I (jgw, WLTRes founder & PI, site builder and principle site content contributor thus far, have finally obtained the "pro" version of the Community Builder more feature-rich extensions, modules and plugins for this now "old" Joomla! version J1.5.26 site
  • While my (jgw's) efforts to finish building-out the J2.5.x "clone" of this site are continuing, users of this "old" J1.5.x site will be able to starting adding more contact information as well as their personal and professional knowledge and skill sets, their availability to be volunteers to help improve this web site and/or to work in groups defined on this site, their interest in being "instructional designers," or special topic content researchers or developers and/or general site article or web links contributors.
  • And THAT is what I've been building-out this site for since 2009 !!!  The "above" is a start; more on the updated WLTRes "Mission" soon.
Read more: Web Site Status 13.02.08

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Category: Site Technical News
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I, JGW the site founder, administrator and primary content contributor, have been "distracted" since 2010 from my top priority interest to develop this site and its content for the sake of developing my progressive ideas, opinions and networking with like-minded progressives in the USA.  The results of my latter efforts are available at www.CAGreenIDEAS.org.

But more problematic has been the fact that the available free Joomla! web site "migration" tools, a.k.a. Joomla! extensions, have been all too few and terribly flawed. Worse the developers of these flawed migration extensions remained sufficiently incompetent or deficient in their abilities to "master" the Joomla! migration process that their subsequent "improved versions" of their software remained -- and to this day remains -- flawed in too many ways to be that helpful to me and to 100s, perhaps 1000s, of Joomla! web site owners and administrators!  Therefore my good intentions to take a bit of time from "political site building" to upgrade this Joomla! version 1.5 site to either version 2.5 or as of this writing to version 3.4.

This October 2015 as my political site building and maintenance activities are about to "wind down," I have chosen to UPGRADE THE HARDER WAY in order to get the upgrade job done 100% right and the way I want it done.  I will take the version 2.5 flawed copy of this site and manually, article-by-article, web-link by web-link, article and web-link category by category duplicate and improve upon the layout of those articles and web-links and the outline-like hierarchy of the cateogies in which they are "filed" on the 2.5 site. When donw with that manual upgrade to 2.5, I will run the latest free migration tool to produce a 90+% correct, but still slightly flawed, J3.4 or J3.5 site. Then I will repeat the article-by-article and web-link by web-link copying of content from the "correct" J2.5 site to the J3.4 or J3.5 site. 

When that is done I will yell, screw and curse for a while...  But future migrations should be much easier, more efficient and more close to 100% correctly migrated by the free software!  Then I can recommend such software for use by educators who chose to use Joomla! for their school or department or class web site(s).

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