Greetings from the Grand Canyon State

Hello, everyone. I’m Dennis Oliver. I live in Arizona, a state in the
southwestern part of the U.S. Until recently, I worked as an ESL and
Developmental English teacher at Estrella Mountain Communty College,
a two-year institution located close to my home in far-west Phoenix.

I’ve been involved in online ELT since the mid-1990s, mostly in creating
WWW-based learning materials. Believe it or not, some of my early works
are still online in three places at Dave’s ESL Cafe and at one of the
Listening links at Ron-Chang Li’s ESL site. I think I still have things online
at one of Charles Kelly’s many sites, too.

For a long time, my online materials were non-dynamic teaching modules,
but around 2001 or 2002, I began to see the need for more interactive,
participatory elements. I didn’t really know how to do that, however, until
I became familiar with the outstanding contributions of two remarkable
people: first Barbara ("Bee") Dieu and later Carla Arena. Both Bee and
Carla have helped me acquire many insights that (I hope) will result in
creating materials which are collaborative, interactive, and result in both
"co-teaching" and "co-learning." I hope to learn more as a result of this seminar.

I’ll freely admit from the outset that I’ll probably do more lurking than
contributing to SMiELT—simply because I have too many things competing
for my time and energy. Even so, I will try to be as active as I can—really!

If you’d like to see what I look like and learn a little more about me,
click HERE.

Best wishes—

Dennis in Phoenix