The paper I am presenting

at the Distance Ed seminar in PM this weekend arose out of the understanding I got from talking to several academics that Dist Ed is only for people who do not get scholarships for full time campus study and therefore Dist Ed was synonymous for people who had failed to qualify for Univ and who would be a drain on their teaching time. I am not making this up. This "perspective" comes from educated/"educated" people who having done well themselves in one aspect of their life cannot seem to recognise that there may be students on one of the remote islands or mountain villages or in the western mining towns who would feel threated by coming to a big town like Lae and who by doing so would set themselves up for academic failure in the Western sense of the term "academic failure" My paper wonders what is "academic success". Is it confined to the western model of intelligence - the type of thing that western intelligence tests measured on people who had not seen a plane or a refirgerator? My experience of the need to differentiate came as a result of teaching in Aboriginal communities where numeracy understandings in tribal culture necessitated only the concepts "plenty" in which the word was doubled as in "Wagga Wagga" or few or not many in which case the meaning would be just "Wagga" for example.