[seul-edu] Introduction

[Michael Hall <admin@mulga.com.au>]

G'day All:

I just received an automated invitation to introduce myself to the list
and it sounds like a good idea so here goes ...

My name is Michael Hall and I am an ESL (English as a Second Language)
teacher at Larapinta Primary School in Alice Springs in Central Australia.
Central Australia is a desert region and almost all my students are
Aboriginal students from Arrente, Warlpiri, Luritja and Pitjantjatjara
backgrounds. My academic background is in linguistics and I was awarded a
Masters degree in Applied Linguistics in 1997. 

I have been involved with Linux, PHP and MySQL for about a year now and
feel that my skills are maturing to the point where I can undertake some
serious open source development work. As a teacher, educational
applications are an obvious interest.

I'm interested in:

* web applications that make a teacher's daily life easier
(paperless office type apps)

* web apps that encourage open ended, collaborative investigative learning
(eg building a website on a given topic, with peer review of texts,
forum discussion, etc, etc). 

* the educational psychology of Vygotsky (zpd, scaffolding, etc)

* the educational philosophy of
Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society) and in the potential that web
technologies have for building the learning networks that Illich
advocates. Nevertheless, I recognise that schools as we know them
are with us to stay for the time being (even if for reasons that often
have little to do with education per se). 

If anything here strikes a chord with others on the list, by all
means contact me if I can help with an existing project or perhaps we
could start something new. I'm happy to be involved with coding, testing,
and/or documentation. 

Michael Hall