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My name is Bill Price, and I'm the technology coordinator at the University of Pittsburgh English Language Institute. I've also been teaching ESL there for about ten years.
My academic background is in applied linguistics and TESOL, but I've tied technology into my work and activities since I was a child. Through middle school and high school, I built at least a dozen websites, three of which I administered on behalf of a club or organization. I also learned to program more generally. After I became the senior editor of my high school's literary magazine, I spent my time at the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for Information Technology making a content management system from scratch using PHP and a MySQL backend to enable students to digitally submit their writing and artwork and comment on each others' work. In the following months, my senior project was to build a website for the German department of my high school.
In my undergraduate and postgraduate studies, I became interested in computer-assisted language learning. The vocabulary acquisition and retention experiments I ran continued to put my programming skills to the test, but a bit of patience and enthusiasm can take you a long way when your goal is to help people learn robustly and efficiently.