I have just spent a very pleasant day with ten visiting educators from Thailand. Nine of them arrived yesterday. One, Nun, has been here for a couple of weeks already as part of a longer six week stay. I helped Nun with the technical aspects of a presentation she gave last week, so we have already spent quite a bit of time together surrounded by computers and video equipment.
We hear that the flight from Seattle was a bumpy one. Jim Vernon and I met the nine new arrivals in the parking lot of their hotel. They also got to meet Jim's dog, Johnny, who seemed to get along well with everyone. We followed their van up to campus and joined them in the conference room of the Office of International Programs at Montana State University where we had an orientation. The OIP folks did a very professional job getting everyone settled in, taking care of travel documents and providing everyone with maps of Montana, Bozeman and the campus.
Dr. Brody oriented everyone to the program which we will follow over the next two weeks, and assigned everyone the task of being able to summarize what they hope to get out of the program. The emphasis is on active learning and the take away message for the day was "active learning requires active teaching."
We had a tour of the MSU campus, lunch at the Bamboo Gardens, then a walk down Main Street, up Pete's Hill for an overview of the town, and back to the hotel by way of a lovely residential neighborhood. The day was all sunshine (perhaps a bit too much at times) blue skies and autumn leaves. I had no camera with me, but plenty of pictures were taken. Our visitors seemed pleased with the general friendliness of the people we encountered on the walk. All in all, a fine introduction to Bozeman. Tomorrow, the serious work begins.
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