SCROLL DOWN TO AUSTRALIA SPECIAL NEEDS RESOURCES

The Mahalo page on special education is also not finished yet, Mahalo is still new and they need a lot of help in many topics
http://www.mahalo.com/Special_education

HOW USEFUL IS MAHALO/MAHALO ANSWERS REALLY? COMPARED TO THE EARTH'S BIGGEST ONLINE STORE:

Since you have asked the questions together I will answer them together and
pick a comparison because you have left it open.

Books @ amazon.com 65 books contain the words australian special needs education
http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1243154035/ref=sr_nr_i_0?ie=UTF8&rs=&keywords=australian%20special%20needs%20education&rh=i:aps,k:australian%20special%20needs%20education,i:stripbooks

Books @ amazon.com 127 books contain the words australia special needs education
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=australia+special+needs+education&x=13&y=17

These amazon.com (Earth's biggest store they say) searches are sorted by relevance. amazon.com is also a U.S. centric store, but with an international reach. On the first page http://www.amazon.com scroll down the middle of the page to their shipping rates and policies and follow a logical sequence of pages you will find the Australian shipping page:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hy_f_3?ie=UTF8&nodeId=468520

In amazon.com you do not control the Australian content unless you wish to start an online store and sell Australian materials. I quickly scanned the start of the two searches above, and though they are sorted by relevance I did not quickly see anything specific to Australia in your topic. However, in Mahalo Answers, you control the content. So, if there are no questions mentioning Australia in the question, no one has asked questions related to Australia.

So, if you wish to improve the visibility of Australia in amazon.com other than starting a store, you could contact your Australian professional associations that sell professional literature specific to Australia, and book publishers that are specific to Australia in your areas of interest, and magazines and professional journals with an Australian focus and make sure that they all
sell their products at amazon.com

How useful is Mahalo Answers? and Mahalo? I would say it is as useful as you make it. I have done searches for really obvious important topics that ought to be in there I thought, and over a number of days have searched for more combinations of words etc. and then my friends have also searched there because I have recommended Mahalo to them as an information resource and without even contacting Mahalo and saying, hey, this is important you ought to do something about it, they must be getting the stats on the hits, and miraculously I see a page being created on that key topic after that. So, Mahalo is responsive, and if you post something on Mahalo Answers it too is responsive, it takes your questions and presents them to your community. So, if you are saying that people are not signing onto Mahalo because there is no Australian material, well, that can be fixed easily, by you and your colleagues and friends who become active in topics of interest to you.

I am not convinced that makeing a special Australia section will solve the fact that everyone is waiting for Australian content and no one is submitting it, when Australians have more expertise to give Australian content than any Mahalo staffers who are also tasked to meet deadline on a new product
coming up that no one knows yet what it will do - and working on Australian content has priority for them based on number of hits and searches, and if no hits or searches then they may be working first on all the other country pages that do have more hits so it is a chicken and egg situation is it not?

I saw content was not in Mahalo Answers that should be there and I asked questions to put it there. That is one way you can make a difference that could form the foundation for Australian content in Mahalo and Mahalo Answers for the next few hundred years as Mahalo evolves into the global entity it probably will need to become to stay relevant. You would be one of the founders.

AUSTRALIAN RESOURCES FOR LEARNERS WITH SPECIAL NEEDS

I will just say that there are difficulties answering an Australian centric special needs education question.
My question marks include what level from pre-school & primary through high school & college or is adult education implied?
Does the term "special needs" imply only physical challenges or are mental, emotional, spiritual, developmental challenges also implied?
Does this term include those with special needs due to being gifted, disadvantaged backgrounds, second or third or fourth language learners,
recent immigrants or refugees, adult learners without previous current education knowledge, life skills deficient students,
incarcerated or newly released convicts, literacy education including reading, writing, numeracy, computer skills, inclusive education etc.
or are those separate categories not implied in special needs. So I will answer broadly and pick a few things.

LARGE PRINT WEBSITE:
Aussie Educator Special Education
http://www.aussieeducator.org.au/education_special.html

JOURNALS WITH FREE WEB CONTENT
Australian Journal of Educational & Developmental Psychology (AJEDP) Current Issue
http://www.newcastle.edu.au/group/ajedp/current.html

SELECTED FREE ARTICLES

Babies and Sign Language
http://www.babies-and-sign-language.com/special-educational-need-child-special-needs.html

Adult ESL Learners with Special Needs: Learning from the Australian Perspective
http://www.cal.org/caela/esl_resources/digests/AUSQA.html

Website launched to help growing number of children affected by Asperger’s Syndrome
http://www.prlog.org/10104633-website-launched-to-help-growing-number-of-children-affected-by-aspergers-syndrome.html

School and classroom practices in inclusive education in Australia.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/School+and+classroom+practices+in+inclusive+education+in+Australia.-a0168163374

Gympie TAFE celebrates abilities of the disabled; Disability Action Week function at local campus.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Gympie+TAFE+celebrates+abilities+of+the+disabled;+Disability+Action...-a0196112935

Perceived control and adaptive coping: programs for adolescent students who have learning disabilities.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Perceived+control+and+adaptive+coping:+programs+for+adolescent...-a0184744944

Education revolutions, left, right and centre. (history of Australian educational reform)
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Education+revolutions,+left,+right+and+centre.-a0172684793
http://www.newcastle.edu.au/group/ajedp/current.html

Education in Australia (The Free Dictionary)
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Education+in+Australia

PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS
Early Childhood Intervention Australia
http://www.ecia.org.au/
ECIA Publications for sale:
Does This Child Need Help? Identification and Early Childhood Intervention (2nd Edition)
Early Childhood Intervention CD
http://www.ecia.org.au/html/Publications.html
Australian Organizations Links (Across Australia & internationally with descriptions)
http://www.ecia.org.au/html/links.html

Lifestart Helping Special Kids
http://www.lifestart.org.au/

Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children (RIDBC), Australia’s premier provider of educational services to children with hearing and/or vision impairment.
(they have resources and publications)
http://www.ridbc.org.au/

Macquarie University Special Education Centre (MUSEC), the Centre for Research and Teaching in Special Education, enjoys a national and international reputation for the quality of its research, its excellence in postgraduate teaching and its contribution to program development in the area of Special Education.
http://www.musec.mq.edu.au/home.aspx

Special Interest Schools in South Australia (links)
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Special+interest+high+schools+in+South+Australia

DECS Funded Special Interest Secondary Schools (Government of Australia Dept of Education & Children's Services)
http://www.decs.sa.gov.au/aboutdept/default.asp?id=27510&navgrp=1637

Royal Academy of Dance Australia Special Needs Policy
http://www.rad.org.au/index.cfm?objectid=C8B15172-D600-91DA-7B6CF3EB5B330A70

Dolphin Aid Australia
http://www.dolphinaid-oz.org/index.htm

In conclusion, yes indeed Mahalo Answers can be very useful for your chosen topics and perspectives but it will take a lot of work by many people to make it happen.

P.S. You may find the searchbox to be useful at the top right of many pages. It can be toggled between Mahalo (the search engine with human generated pages) and Mahalo Answers ( the question and answer site). If you type slowly, and maybe delete and retype a number of times if the system is not busy you will see keywords pop up with phrases. That is one way to see what is in the system. A really good way to find Australia or Australian questions and answers is to put that word one at a time in the searchbox for Mahalo Answers. You will see that indeed there are many questions that are Australian centric, but maybe you have a shortage of people answering them from Australia if that is what you are looking for rather than the global community that reads Mahalo. How could you increase participation of Australian nationals online? That may be best answered by you. Good luck.

Creative Commons by Sami Keinänen