The original ESL-Group Website was constructed in 1997 on a Geocities free homepage and it was created to house my students' homepages. At that time I was teaching English to mainly Swiss, Korean, and Japanese students in Queensland, Australia. At the school where I was teaching they provided an Activities Options Afternoon on Fridays and this I saw as an opportunity to experiment with "Internet as a learning tool". A few points that I wish to mention: At that time there were many theories about learning and the WWW but very little evidence to support them (mainly rhetorical). There were relatively few quality EFL / ESL sites on the WWW. There were very few sites offering Free ESL / EFL learning materials, and very few teachers were actually using the WWW for practical teaching and learning. The primary objectives of our activities were to encourage the students to participate in writing (homepage content) and to practice communicating in English via E-Mail. As a side benefit they learnt how to build a homepage using HTML and some of them became technology enthusiasts. I have long since left that school and moved to Indonesia, and consequently the site, while still alive, has not been maintained properly till now. The primary reasons were that most of the links to my past student websites began to become inactive and there were many new and excellent ESL websites developing by that time. I have about 40 active education sites to maintain and I couldn't see how I could really contribute anything significant given my existing time constraints. However, because of my own difficulties sorting through the maze of ESL / EFL websites that are currently available (my bookmarks list is frightening), and with new sites coming online almost every day I decided to resurrect the site because I can now see a very import role for the ESL-Group website for both myself and my current and future students. I decided to maintain the old page's informal format, it was created for students, but the content and links will be regularly updated. For ESL / EFL students the site will provide an opportunity to promote their personal websites, access our Pen-friends database, and easily locate quality learning resources from around the globe. For ESL / EFL teachers the site will remain a resource (together with Teachers' Corner) for contacting other teachers, finding useful ESL / EFL links to resources, and a general medium for communication. Warmest regards Phillip Rekdale January 31, 2004