Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday I started a workshop on blended learning with the faculty from the Education Sciences.  About half of the audience teaches in traditional face-to-face teacher education programs and the other half in in-service distance education programs.  As mentioned in an earlier post, North-West University’s distance education program enrolls 30,000 students, most of whom live and work in rural areas of South Africa.   The session went well.

In the evening,  I had dinner with the Dean of the Faculty of Education Sciences, Robert Balfour, and members of his administration. Dr. Balfour is a linguist and is familiar with the work of our CUNY Graduate Center colleague, Ofelia Garcia.  Dr. Balfour and his colleagues are a dedicated group of educators whose purpose is to provide quality teacher education programs for the people of South Africa.

Tony