I, the PI and web site developer, have accomplished the following tasks between my last web site status report in August 2010 and this end-of-the-year report:
- I have added much content to the site primarily in the form of web links to recent news articles about education.
- Web links on this site are now re-arranged into alphabetized categories and sub-categories to improve visual searching through any given list of them.
- In August 2010 I re-joined the several 100s of users of the previous version of conference system users as one of the beta testers. In that role I helped to evaluate the latest release of a web conferencing system, due to be released to the general public in November or December 2010.
- I installed and un-installed a number of extensions (i.e. their respective components, modules and/or plug-ins, notable un-installing the huge CiviCRM extension which while powerful seems too cumbersome.
- As of December 20, 2010, the GVOConference online web conferencing service is available on this web site in the form of 10 instances of the GVOConference room. For now any site visitor can use any of these 10 web conferencing rooms for whatever purposes they like on a first come, first serve basis. Site visitors and logged in site users can also follow web links to sign-up for their own GVOConference room, $8.97/month for a 50-seat room available to them 24x7x365, and the use of which will be entirely under their control.
- As of December 29, 2010, an online conference room scheduling, online conference event registration, and online event notification system is still "in evaluation and development" in five forms (or event sub-systems), four of which are "off-the-shelf" turn-key free extensions to the Joomla CMS (JEvents, EventList, CB Events). The fifth open source scheduling system, iCalScheduler, is not a Joomla extension, but is a stand-alone web service. In some ways iCalScheduler works better than do any of the Joomla extensions. But it needs a great deal of extra computer programming to be of use on this web site. In any case, the resulting system I hope to deploy on this web site in Q1 2011 will improve the ability of educators to setup and hold online meetings or classes, inter-connect two or more meeting rooms or classrooms, and with respect to educators and trainers to conduct a virtual class in an inter-linked virtual classroom.
Upcoming Web Site Improvements:
- In early January 2011, I will upgrade this web site to use the latest major release of the Joomla content management system (CMS), version 1.6-rc1 where "rc1" means: "release candidate #1". This site has been powered by Joomla version 1.5.12 through 1.5.18 since March 2009. For details on the improvements that version 1.6 brings to a web site, see the www.Joomla.org web site.
- Date, time and author "stamps" are to be displayed with each web link. This will also allow a site visitor to search for and receive a list of both related articles and related web links in a number of different "meta categories" including article and web link "tags", a data-ranges and/or by author of the article and/or contributor of the web link.