My name is Phillip Rekdale and I am a graduate of Griffith University (1996) with majors in Teaching and Human Resource Development. However, my original career was in Electronics Education and Education Technology. I love Indonesia and its people and I hope that together we can help to raise the quality of education in this country.

I have worked in the Education and Education Technology fields in Australia for over 22 years and in Indonesia for 16 years. Most of my experience has been in universities and other forms of tertiary education including TAFE, as well as 6 years in a school that taught from Primary to Year 12. In Indonesia I have worked for 2 years as a Technology and School Development Consultant for the Ministry of Education, Indonesia, and I have been active in the Indonesian education arena as a consultant on other education projects and also as a Director of Studies at an Australain / Indonesian International Institute. I also own/manage about 150 domain names and about 70 active websites that deal mainly with Indonesian education issues.

I have been interested in Indonesian education ("pendidikan" in Malay/Indonesian) since my first assignment here in 1983 because my duties in those days included the selection of trainees for education technology positions. From my observations in other institutions and my experiences in my own institution interviewing many relatively highly educated candidates 'it appeared' that there may be three key issues that need addressing regarding aspects of an Indonesian education. (1) An Indonesian education doesn't appear to encourage learners to think individually, be critical, analyze, or to be independent. (2) Middle-level vocational education particularly for technical staff, general staff, secretaries, etc. is clearly inadequate. (3) Almost all forms of education beyond basic education appear to be too expensive for the majority of the population.

I have been using and working with computers since early 1972 however only in recent years I have become interested the Internet because of the greatly improved communication capabilities of the new generations of computers and the range of materials that were beginning to become available on the WWW. Before coming back to Indonesia in 1998 I searched the Internet for Indonesian education resources (in Indonesian) and it was apparent that useful information for teachers and students was practically non-existent. Therefore, before I arrived I already had thoughts of expanding upon the amount of information currently available even though I had no idea what form this should take.

Having just completed two assignments with DEPDIKNAS (National Ministry of Education) as (1) Language Technology Consultant and (2) School Development Consultant it was very clear that there are many Indonesian educators and school principals in the field who really care about education and are interested in improving their professionalism and the quality of education in Indonesia. There are also many exciting self-initiatives taking place in schools that greatly benefit their learners. However, a problem that seriously undermines national development is that educators do not have an effective communication system for disseminating or sharing the information with their colleagues in other schools. Therefore, their experiences, knowledge, and replicable development in these limited number of schools is not being transferred and is not benefiting the thousands of other similar schools as it should. I believed that the first most important step was the creation of a communication network - provide an opportunity for educators and students to share their thoughts, experiences and knowledge!

In 1998 I created a Senior Secondary Education (Sekolah Menengah Umum - http://smun.net) website. It was my first ever serious attempt at a homepage and after extensive searches of the Internet for Indonesian education resources, it became very clear that little useful material or information for schools was currently available on the Internet. There was considerable hype (rhetoric) about the benefits of the Internet for education in Indonesia, however actual useful content was almost non-existent. And, even more importantly, the opportunities for the Indonesian education community to participate and contribute to the development of education (via the Internet) appeared to be zero.