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...
- 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. - 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.
- 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.
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Upgrading this WLTRes site's CMS from Joomla v1.5.x to Joomla v2.5.x
And this effort takes some time to plan and practice. So the Maha Mayan Solstice holidays (days before and since the 12/21/12 mislabeled end-of-the-world) seemed like a good time to start that effort.
I, JGW the WLTRes web site creator, developer and thus far the sole content provider have not "really worked" on adding content to this site since about mid 2011. I changed my focus to work 3/4 to full-time, on-spec (for free) to build-out and enrich content on another Joomla! powered web site I created, CAGreenIDEAS.org.
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This WebLearningTools Research (a.k.a. WLTRes) web site continues to function normally as it has since late November 2011, if sadly with decreased public interest since that time. As of August 29, 2012 (12.08.29) the site now has sufficient "new account registration" and log in security that it can accept educators, graduate students, and the members of the general public that are interested in distance learning as users of this site and any more private information contained on this site. The current Joomla! (tm) version of the site is v1.5.26, and may change soon to v1.6.x, then v1.7.x and then to the latest version of v2.5.x. It takes some time for extension developers for each of these versions "past" v1.5.x to improve their extension code accordingly. Joomla! extension and web site "core Joomla!" upgrading tools introduced in November 2011 have continued to make baseline WLTRes site administration and backups much more easy to do, giving the site's content and features greater "digital integrity."
The WebLearningProductions (a.k.a. WLProd) web site was in "early development" (as an empty no-content Joomla! web site) since 2009. However I did not develop it for many months first in deference to my (JGW's) work to develop this WLTRes site. With the unexpected "radical-right-wing" turn in the U.S. General Election of 2010, I then spent very much of my site development time not developing WLTRes further but instead developing my CAGreenIDEAS.org (CAGI) web site. See my "Announcement" article apologizing for the time I have taken on CAGI and away from WLTRes development.
The primary goal of the WLProd site has been and will continue to be to facilitate the work of instructional designers and content developers with their instructional needs analysis, instructional design, and instruction development and testing of web based course-ware. Evidence of useful web tools that enable educators to perform this work should become evident in the remaining months of 2012 and in early 2013. If you already have a distance learning lesson or class developed or a lesson or class or curriculum in-development, PLEASE consider putting a copy of it on the WLProd site for further development in what I hope will be the "more advanced" ways discussed on the WLTRes and WLTProd web sites.
The WebLearningClasses (a.k.a. WLClasses) web site has existed for one year and is under very early development (i.e. I have not built it out at all as of 12.08.29). The primary goal of the WLClasses site will be to facilitate the distance learning class prototyping, test-using and test-use evaluations, and the final deployment of lessons and/or classes that are the work-products of instructional designers and content developers as well as the end-user educators and some brave volunteer student (or graduated students) willing to test-use any prototyped or "release candidate 1+" or "version 1.x" instances of a distance learning class or training. Any such deployed lessons or classes on the WLTClasses site, or taken from the site, MUST be offered free to the poorest students and at very low cost to those less able to afford a fee.
I, JGW, now have a bit more time to explore "porting" the above "Web Learning" Joomla! sites and their contents to a "90+% clone" Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 site of a similar name, content, and with the same or better distance learning enabling functions. For the record: Drupal 7 is fast becoming the CMS-of-choice for many colleges and universities across the USA as of summer 2012. But there is as yet no "stable version 1+" release of a specifically brick-and-mortar and/or distance learning education-enabling distribution of Drupal ...or of Joomla! for that matter.
So register for an account on WLTRes, log in, and contribute your thoughts and feature wish lists to that site; start a tiny lesson or class outline on WLTProd when that site announces log ins are possible. Maybe the WLTRes, WLTProd, and WLTClasses sites will become show cases of what progressive educators and computer technicians, all fans of creating better affordable public education, can do better than the large well financed global corporations that are buying up closed public schools and college campuses in the hopes of turning them into more private, for-profit educational institutions.
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This WebLearningTools Research (WLTRes) web site has been functioning normally since late November 2011. The current Joomla! version of the site is v1.5.25. Newly introduced extension and web site "core Joomla!" upgrading tools have made baseline site administration and backups much more easy to do, giving the site's content and features greater "digitial integrity."
The WebLearningProductions (WLProd) web site is under early development. The primary goal of WLProd will be to facilitate the work of instructional designers and content developers with their instructional needs analysis, instructional design, and instruction development and testing of web based courseware.
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- 11.10.31: Installed the "Kunena" Forum management service on this site. Setup several "forum categories" in this service that are now visible in the left-hand-side menu of the site. The web site can now collect site visitor and logged-in site user comments, remarks and suggestions in the several Forum Categories now available as well as add their comments to existing articles published on this web site.
- 11.10.18: Upgraded the Joomla! v1.5.23 core server code base automatically to Joomla! v1.5.24. Did so with a relatively new "Akeeba" backup extension upgrade tool. Akeeba made a site code files and database backup automatically before performing the site core files upgrade. This is a long missing and very welcome feature for Joomla! web sites.
- 11.10.15-16: Rebuilt the WLTRes web site from scratch (called a clean install) after backing up the site content as of 10.15. Restored content within 8 hours and the left hand side menu (LHS) within 24 hours. The LHS menu is incomplete but what is there takes the site visitor to most of the content. The rebuild restored the broken editing functions missing since the March 2011 hack of my site and other sites on the web hosting server computer. My (JGW, site administator) checking and re-enabling all working features as were operating aok in the earlier months of 2011 will take many more days' work.
- 11.09-10: Documented in a private "ToDo" file new "Education News" web links I want to add to this site when I have restored the web link (and other) editing functions of the site.
