Dear colleagues and friends,

It has been quite a while since last time we had the pleasure of introducing our journal to you. I need to apologize for the long silence – this No. 8 issue is late in the year and happens to be very short. The idea to offer an entire issue on distance learning didn’t turn as expected and a number of originally planned contributors from the U.S. simply disappeared.  But regardless, we are up on the web and ready to go on with our activities.

The best part of the whole journal adventure is you, our readers. We have accumulated quite a number of people from 106 (!) countries across the world. If you look at the picture below, you will notice that practically every continent has read our journal (highlighted in green), which keeps us going and trying our best.

As for the issue you are planning to read now, it has a number of interesting articles on distance learning which represent the activities of two Russian higher educational establishments – Regional Open Social Institute and Regional Institute for Finance and Economics from Kursk (Svetlana Sholenkova, Galina Shoitova, Vera Butova) and two American universities – Seattle Pacific University and Antioch University Seattle (David Wicks and Janiess Sallee, Peter Rojcewicz and Shana Hormann) as well as the experience of the Center for Continuing Education from a Volga city Rybinsk in the Yaroslavl Region (Svetlana Karastelina and Svetlana Shuvalova). As usual, we have the pleasure to publish an article in our series on the history of education written by a renowned researcher Mikhail Boguslavsky but this time – about a famous Russian thinker who is still alive and active, Dr. Shalva Alexandrovich Amonashvili.  We are happy and proud to be able to tell the world about this original researcher and unique personality and we also send our greetings to him on his recent 80-th birthday. Many happy returns of the day, dear Shalva Alexandrovich!

And now without any further ado, please go ahead, read the papers, and send us your comments and responses.

Always yours,
Tatyana Tsyrlina-Spady
Editor-in-Chief