In the attached top picture of a UVsphere the red selected faces have been extruded (Individual Faces) out from the UVsphere.   I want to now scale down the selected faces all at once without having them move their relative position.  Is there a way of doing this in Blender?  I want to scale each face using its surface normal as the origin point of the scale rather than the center of the sphere.  So far the only way I have been able to do this is to numerically scale each face individually as in the bottom sphere image.

From the menu bar, the Pivot Selection drop down menu will give you what you're looking for.  Selecting individual centers worked for me. 

This works for other actions as well.  Rotation, etc.

Scott

 Have you tried ALT+S?

Reddog9 and Touchwood

Thanks for your answers.  Interestingly both solutions do what I asked but they give different results.

Reddog9 your solution gave me the result I wanted as this "Scaled" each face at its origin point.

Touchwood your solution resulted in a "Shrink/Fatten" of the selected faces.

Looking at the results it appears that the Alt+S performs some form of non-uniform scale in this particular instance.

I'd be interested if someone can give a clearer explanation as to what the difference between the two actually is.

Fastest way is to get one spoke done the way you want it, delete the remaining vertices and then spin dupe the remainder.

fls13

I'll have a look at your suggestion as I'm very interested in learning all the tips and tricks on how Blender works .  The picture example I gave above was to explain the way that I wanted to achieve a result more than specifically for that model.  Coming from 3ds Max I'm trying to get a handle on how Blender performs some of the common core modeling functions that I am used to.