Biography: Thomas Koller

[Thomas Koller]

I am 35 years old and I live in Nottingham (UK). I work as an e-learning developer at the University of Nottingham. In my job I have been developing interactive and multimodal e-learning tools for foreign language learning. So far this has been done for English and German, but soon I will also develop materials for a host of other languages (Romance, Slavic and Eastern Asian languages). I usually develop materials with a combination of Flash, server-side scripts (Perl, PHP, Java), XML and MySQL.

My professional background is mixed: I am a trained nurse and I worked as a nurse for a couple of years (mainly in psychiatric hospitals). I have a German Master's degree in languages (Spanish, Italian and Russian), computational linguistics and didactics. I am currently finishing my PhD (alongside my job) which I have been doing at Dublin City University. In my PhD I developed plurilingual language learning materials for French, Italian and Spanish.

I am interested in joining the Education Forum to discuss language learning topics with experienced language teaching practitioners and other developers of web-based language learning materials.