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The Firewall in the Mind (Slide 32)
Webheads: how it started

Webheads started with English for Internet at http://www.study.com, the brainchild of Dave Winet, with whom I once did a panel discussion at a recent TESOL Conference (after working with him online). Unfortunately we didn't have an Internet connection at that session and it was rather hard to describe what we were doing without showing people. Dave's study.com website collects students whom Dave parcels out to whatever teachers are teaching online classes based on the students' expressed interests. The whole thing is free to the students and the teachers are volunteers.

In 1995 I moved to California to work in courseware development, and to keep my hand in teaching I volunteered to teach at the EFI. My first course was an email one and it faltered over student disinterest with the exception of one student from Italy who was so into it he actually created a web page for the course. Unfortunately he had committed a lot of energy to the web page and abandoned the project himself in the face of the aforementioned apathy. Although others have claimed to succeed where I did not, I found it hard to sustain student interest through only the medium of email.