Since March 1998 WebLearningTools Research (or WLTRes) has been a "d.b.a." (doing business as) "front" or pseudonym (i.e. a 2nd name or a business name) for me, Jennifer Gopinathadasi Woodward, MA Instructional Technology. I am the founder of "WebLearningTools" and principal investigator. I intend the "front d.b.a. operation" to soon become a California 501-C3 non-profit organization focused on education for non-technical educators about and research in mostly technical areas of distance learning and intelligent tutoring systems that relate to the delivery of "better" affordable education and educational outcomes. But before non-profit incorporation can happen, I had to define the future organization, test-run it as a party (person) of one or two, and build-out this web site to help "run it," to inform and educate all who use WLTRes and to keep in contact and facilitate the online collaborative work of all those who volunteer to work to achieve the goals defined on the WLTRes web site.
There are very few active project details here so far, and those that are here are viewable only by registered site users with the appropriate additional access permissions. Active projects currently consist of site-development projects. There are no completed Moodle-based or Drupal-based classes or tutorials published here yet that are ready for free public examination or for free or tuition-required public use.
However, there will be some partially updated PowerPoint "slide shows" of talks I gave in Lima, Peru, in 2002 on distance learning. Nevertheless from what is already web-published here, and what will be appearing in coming months, I hope you can get the "gist" of what else "we" (a special interest group or groups to be formed) are going to publish here "soon" and in coming months and years as we "evolve" the site content, services to educators and technicians, and our overall goals and objectives.
Through your casual browsing and searching of this site, you should also be able to determine what else "we" might develop collaboratively online using this WLTRes web site. The "employees" who will do the collaborative work yet to be explicitly defined in detail for some time will be "just" volunteers perhaps including yourself. If volunteer work produces results that with funding could become prototype or a deployed educational site, I or some of us solicit grant money to do so.
To provide WLTRes site content to site users world-wide in at least three (3) languages, English, French, and Spanish, some tasks to be defined, tracked and coordinated here will include those of translators. Those will be mostly the volunteer services of qualified registered site users who are fluent in two of the three primary site languages: English, Spanish (espanol), and French (francais).
To help us work collaboratively, more efficiently and effectively in these tasks, we will be using the project management features available on this web site that will be offered to qualified registered users of this site. I am open to your suggestions for other directions "we" should take and to your constructive criticisms of the directions I have already presented here. Please send your remarks and suggestions to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or log in and submit an article or log in and submit a Forum category topic posting.
WebLearningTools Research personnel and world-wide on-line collaborators will be investigating, reporting, and developing "More Appropriate & Effective" uses of Distance Learning (DL) to help improve and maximize educational outcomes. These efforts will expand on the work that the principal investigator (PI) has been doing since 1997 and to a lesser extent since 1991.
The WebLearningTools Research web site, version 2, is to be a collaborative research and development operation. In other words, in addition to the principal investigator (WLT PI), her staff and consultants, registered on-line contributors anywhere in the world can contribute to the research activities and the development of any educational and software work-products made available at this web-site.
Contributors potentially can be any lay-person, non-technical person, or technically "wise" person, and any educator or curriculum or course developer or education administrator. Areas of interest in general will be for those (1) with an interest in defining and contributing to the advancement of "appropriate distance learning" technologies and pedagogy (and androgogy), or (2) any competent person who is interested in contributing to the pedagogical, androgogical or technical innovations -- demonstrated on this web-site -- that achieve such goals. All interested people from any country are welcome to register here to be collaborators.
BUT THE REGISTRATION FORM IS NOT YET ACTIVATED. It will be in the "Community Builder" section indicated in the left-hand-side "main menu" displayed on most WLTRes web pages. Until the registration form is ready, please request a new account by email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
Multilingual site menus and article contents are not enabled yet. Registered users should have "fair-to-good" English listening, speaking, reading and writing skills and optionally "good to excellent" skills in one or more of the other listed languages used on this web-site. All registered collaborators may participate collaboratively in developing and refining web-site content, providing translations of web-site content to their native language. They may also participate in refining specific project goals, collaborative work processes, and project work-products that are being and which will be researched and developed here. Once registered, you may choose and add your remarks and suggestions to whatever areas (such as blog topics, forum topics) and to whatever specific web page content are most attractive or important you and to the people for whom you want to see receive much improved education using the special abilities offered by the Internet, distance learning, and human and artificially intelligent tutoring.