--- 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]> ------------------ 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