--- Forwarded Message from Bob Peckham <[log in to unmask]> ---

>Date: Wed, 10 Nov 1999 10:43:18 -0600 (CST)
>From: Bob Peckham <[log in to unmask]>
>To: Language Learning and Technology International Information Forum    <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: #5296.19 Technology and Enhanced Student Learning (!)
>In-Reply-To: <[log in to unmask]>

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If Tennessee will fund its planning commission, I will be among the
planners of the Tennessee Virtual University, since I have been named to
that commission.  Our target customers for now are going to be those
people who need a college education, are qualified, but who just cannot
take that moratorium on real-world living to which many young people
devote 4 or 5 years of their lives.  If I did not believe that a single
mother of 2 kids, living 50 miles from campus was capable of deriving real
learning from a variety of distance sources and distance arrangements, I
would have given an absolute NO to the call from systems administrators.  

Building more or larger university campuses and hiring more teachers is
not going to solve the problems we are beginning to run into.  No
intelligent person thinks of distance education as a magic bullet, but we
are really dumb if we stand off at a distance just to question the quality
of those examples we can think of.  I call to your attention that there
are a number of very successful distance education systems in the world.

TBob

Bob Peckham
Director, The Globe-Gate Project
Dept. of Modern Foreign Languages
Univ. of Tennessee-Martin
Martin, TN  38238  USA
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://www.utm.edu/departments/french/french.html
CV: http://globegate.utm.edu/french/globegate_mirror/tbobcv.html