Introducing Myself and my somewhat naive ideas about education.

Hello,
First and for all, I am completely new to Drupal, so forgive me if this post is not where it should be.

Let me introduce myself, I'm Jo, a engineering student beginning my final year at the university college.

Let me tell you how I've got here:
This year I have to write my thesis. And unlike the other students I wanted to try on something unusual. Not the imposed corporate thesis proposals but something that could maybe, in some minute way, benefit society more. Read the title, I like to be naive!
So then, as so often, I immediately thought of my beloved open source and a project I've been imagining.

For a year now, I've wondered why the method of teaching hasn't evolved together with the technology that it's teaching about. These thoughts are easily triggered when you're a student yourself. The standard education system is still in it's 19th century ex-cathedra state and I still experience it daily. But I reckon you've all heard this discourse many times before so I'll cut it short.

The project I was personally aiming for and the thing I now wanted to develop for my master's thesis is the following:
A wikipedia-inspired platform to collectively make teaching materials, exercises, learning tools, etc. and consequently teach people with all of these. I originally imagined a kind of text and slide system inspired by http://www.musictheory.net/. But then a non-flash, open standards and publicly adaptable version.

I expressed these ideas and somebody told me to go and talk to Mixel. And he helped me realize that how potentially beautifully made or ingeniously constructed (I do by no means claim that I now could do either) such a project is nothing without a firm user base. Such software does add nothing to the community if it can't be the solution to a already defined excising problem. Also no single mind can see everything a community wants. If I would develop something that I thought great, it is still most likely a project doomed to fail and to be banned to the pit of forgotten code.

Keeping this in mind, Mixel advised me to seek out the Drupal community where people are actively seeking a solution to an ever increasing demand for new Drupal experts. And an answer to the question of how to educate those an how to educate ourselves about this ever changing platform. Here, I think that the community's questions and goals are the same as mine: "how can we educate people quickly, efficiently and esthetically? The esthetics may sound strange but are, in my opinion, a not to be underestimated part of teaching the love for a subject. How to teach people and have them continuously interested and amused? How to teach them the love for the subject? And all this of course, with all the technology we can muster.

So, here I am, off the beaten track, shaking a the idea of how big this is and slapping myself for the head of how stupid I was not to choose something simple for something as important as a thesis.

Nevertheless, the best way, I think, to feel what can be improved on the education side of Drupal is to walk the road myself. And I'm pretty good fit for this task, knowing almost nothing about Drupal and still wondering if php is more like Java or Bash.

So I'm going to try my hand at the new feature: the novice tag in the issue queue.