David Richardson

Interesting question … I work a lot linking students in Sweden with students in the USA, using ICT. The Americans are constantly amazed at how much more advanced even 'ordinary' students in Sweden are than they are. IM, for example, is very old technology here. There's not much point in using it when you have a well-developed mobile telephone system - why not just send an SMS or make a call instead? (Though, strangely enough, IM is enjoying a brief revival here, since we've also got a well-developed network of 3G telephones and many of them come with Microsoft Messenger installed nowadays.) The problem for people in the US is the market! If you're going to relate each cost a company incurs to some kind of direct monetary benefit, then it's very difficult to provide utilities on a sensible basis. When 3G telephony was being introduced in Europe, the policy of the Swedish government was markedly different to that of most European (right-wing) governments. Instead of auctioning off the bandwidths, the Swedes gave them away for free! But the condition was that the recipients had to prove that a) they could, and they would build a network which was nationwide (i.e. not just for a few wealthy inhabitants of the major cities). The state-owned telecom company was one of the ones whose bid was turned down, by the way. The end result is that we've had 3G for three years now, whilst the rest of the continent is only just getting round to it … because their companies nearly bankrupted themselves in bidding for bandwidth, so they had no money left to actually build the networks. One picture I get of a 'typical American town' is of pylons with cables strung from them. You don't see this in most European towns because we bury our cables. Burying them is an up-front capital cost, whilst having teams and teams of workers driving around all night to check for potential breaks (as they do in many major US cities, like Atlanta) is a running cost … which can be passed straight on to the consumer. We don't need surge protectors for our computers either, since our systems tend to be much more stable. It's a well-known phenomenon in economics: no-one has yet devised a street light which only shines on the people who've paid for the light. In other words, if you're going to have a utility with public benefit, such as a well-developed mobile telephone or computer network, then collective action is the way to go … and the US is not very good at acting collectively.

There have been two very interesting phenomena in all of this: firstly, how quickly the 'veil' fell, revealing a load of unreconstructed rightists; and secondly, how quickly the right-wing government imploded. Reinfeldt's election campaign was all about being 'new' … but it looks very much like the very, very old. The right-wingers in Sweden are a very strange breed. Unlike their counterparts in nearly every other European country, they've hardly ever had the chance to rule the country in modern times. It makes them very susceptible to fad policies, like a flat tax, and it's also meant that they never cleared out the aristocratic right. Bildt came out with a wonderful statement about how 'ordinary people' often had problems paying tax for their nannies, for example! The budget, however, was the usual right-wing fare: you get the poor to work harder by paying them less, and the rich to work harder by paying them more. We're in for a hard four years …

I've never really understood the reasoning that says that around 30,000 NATO and US troops have a better chance of 'pacifying' Afghanistan than 300,000 Soviet troops did. I know that 'we' are better than 'them', but ten times better? What seems to have happened is the same as happened under Soviet occupation - the outsiders do deals with various local warlords to buy time and the illusion of control. You could argue that initially the Soviet Union brought more benefits in terms of investments in infrastructure, schools, hospitals, etc, but most of those benefits were shelled and bombed out of existence in the civil wars that followed Soviet withdrawal. What's to stop the same happening again?

Det är svårt att säga. Mitt intryck av både Lars Leijonborg och Jan Björklund är att de formulerar sin politik utifrån deras 'magkänslor', snarare än någon faktabas eller verklighetskontroll. En satsning på historia som kärnämne passar bra in med både deras magkänslor (skapandet av en 'svenskhet', t.ex.), men det blir, kanske, en syn på historia som är fokuserade på 'stora män', snarare än rörelse i historia. Min tips är att Sverige nu kommer att utsättas för betygshysteri av den typen som Storbritannien drabbas av. Betyg från årskurs 6 (eller 1) låter väldigt bra som debattämne … men det är en hel annan sak att skapa någon form av objektivitet i betygssättning över ett helt land. I min bedömning saknar Sverige kompetens i denna typ av betygssättning, men jag tycker att det är mycket sannolikt att Björklund i synnerhet kommer att stressa för att införa någon form av betygssättning, för forms skull. Ni som arbetar inom skolväsendet kommer med all sannolikhet att ha en hel del mer administrativa jobb att göra med många flera elever (men naturligtvis kommer borgarna att avstå från skattesänkningar, så att man kan anställa extra personal för att täcka merarbetet …). Vi som arbetar på högskole- och universitetsnivå kommer med all sannolikhet att få studenter om ett par år för vilka gapet mellan vad det står i sina betyg och vad de kan faktiskt prestera kommer att vara ännu större än vad den är idag.

I take your point - which, I suppose is my point too! I'm not actually going to go down this path myself, but rather take a long and deep look at Moodle on behalf of some of my colleagues. It sounds really arrogant to put it like this … but I happen to know more about VLEs than they do, despite the fact that they're largely computer technicians who've spent lots of (paid) time looking into various environments. I actually started using TopClass back in the days it was called WEST, which was way back in the dark ages! The problem is that they don't know much about what features most VLEs actually have, so they have a tendency to be dazzled by whatever bit of salesmanship is being hawked. I got an administrator ID on our version of Moodle this morning at 9.00 and by 9.20 I'd created a course … because I've done it before on several similar systems. My initial reaction is that a system like Moodle might be OK for a complete newcomer to on-line learning, who doesn't have time to work out what he or she really wants to do, because the boss has just told them to get their course on-line. A bit like training wheels on a little bicycle, it might help you to avoid falling off the very first time, but it might also make it harder for you to learn to cycle properly. I react to the names 'Learning Management Systems' or 'Virtual Learning Environments'. I tend to call them CIS - 'Course Information Systems' - since all they do is collect fairly boring course information in one place. So, don't worry, Andy, I'm not going over to the dark side!

Many thanks for the quick responses so far. I've passed your mail addresses on to the two Peters, and I expect that they'll be in touch. I've been a bit resistant to VLE/LMSs so far, although I've both used and helped design more than one. My main problem with them is the enthusiasm of central bureaucrats for control of what teachers do! However, I don't want to make a religion of it, and I might ask the two Peters to help me use MOODLE for at least one of my courses in the spring. I think that one of the problems with the development of LMSs is that they tend to get used by total beginners a bit like the training wheels you sometimes use when small children first learn to ride a bike. You can definitely learn without them … and in some ways the use of training wheels actually makes it harder to learn to ride. Among the total beginners are, of course, the IT departments. They're usually very accomplished with the features of various systems, but the benefits to the learning process are usually completely beyond them … because IT technicians are rarely teachers. Still, if I do take the plunge again in the spring, I'll keep you all posted about how it went. I'm writing a blog (very sporadically) called A Distance Teacher's Diary at the moment. You can find it at: http://flexlearning.blogg.se/ There might be one or two things in it which you could use …

I was so organised in sending round that list for people to indicate their willingness to help us with MOODLE, wasn't I … and so disorganised in forgetting to take it with me when I left! May I just ask again, that anyone who's interested in conversing with us about the use of MOODLE as an LMS for an educational institution is welcome and encouraged to send me a mail with their mail address. We won't bother you - it's just that we've got a couple of enthusiasts here who're very interested in talking to people who've been down the same road. You can mail me at david.richardson@hik.se and I'll pass your address on to either Peter Carlsson or Peter Diedrichs. Thanks in advance.

For a Swedish perspective … You're fairly free to obtain firearms in Sweden, provided that you go on a basic safety course, register with the police and undergo an inspection at home, where you demonstrate that you are storing the weapons safely and securely (you have to have an approved gunsafe and separate the breech from the rest of the weapon). If you get done for any offence, or show any medical condition which might lead you to be suspected of using firearms wrongly, they will be seized by the police. Being arrested for drunk driving is one of these cases. I read in my local paper of an elk hunter who collapsed while waiting in his position. He couldn't be raised on the comradio, so his team called in a search party. They found him dead drunk … and all his weapons were seized by the police the same day. He now has to apply to the court to have them restored … and will almost certainly have to undergo treatment for incipient alcoholism, plus do another course on firearms safety before he's allowed to have them back.

I was only with you a short while, but I also appreciated the excellent organisation of the meeting. Thanks, Dalibor, for all your hard work.

Rudyard Kipling's poem, "Arithmetic on the Frontier" ought to be read more often by those deciding to send troops to Afghanistan and Iraq: A great and glorious thing it is To learn, for seven years or so, The Lord knows what of that and this, Ere reckoned fit to face the foe -- The flying bullet down the Pass, That whistles clear: "All flesh is grass." Three hundred pounds per annum spent On making brain and body meeter For all the murderous intent Comprised in "villanous saltpetre!" And after -- ask the Yusufzaies What comes of all our 'ologies. A scrimmage in a Border Station -- A canter down some dark defile -- Two thousand pounds of education Drops to a ten-rupee jezail -- The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride, Shot like a rabbit in a ride! No proposition Euclid wrote, No formulae the text-books know, Will turn the bullet from your coat, Or ward the tulwar's downward blow Strike hard who cares -- shoot straight who can -- The odds are on the cheaper man. One sword-knot stolen from the camp Will pay for all the school expenses Of any Kurrum Valley scamp Who knows no word of moods and tenses, But, being blessed with perfect sight, Picks off our messmates left and right. With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem, The troopships bring us one by one, At vast expense of time and steam, To slay Afridis where they run. The "captives of our bow and spear" Are cheap, alas! as we are dear. ------- The Afridis and Yusufzaies are two tribes from what is now the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a jezail is a musket and a tulwar a type of sword. It comes from Departmental Ditties and Other Verses, published in 1886. It was written about the aftermath of the First Afghan War.

There are a couple of factors which militate against the new government in its desire to bring about a sweeping change to the Swedish system. One of them is the existence of opposition newspapers. The national newspapers in Sweden are basically evening ones, and they're both tabloids. One of them leans left and the other right, but it's the left-leaning one which has by far and away the largest circulation. The two morning papers which are sold in many parts of the country, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet, are both right-wing papers … but they're also really Stockholm's local papers, so people out in the country don't really read them much. Most people get a local morning paper. In many parts of the country, there are two to choose between, usually a left-leaning one and a right-leaning one, so the situation in Sweden as regards access to the media isn't as one-sided as it is in many countries. Just to give one example, how about this comment from an article by Jan Guillou, a well-known journalist, about the Danish cartoons ridiculing Mohammed, which was printed in the left-leaning evening paper Aftonbladet: "If this is really all about freedom of speech, when are we going to see a cartoon showing George W. Bush butt-f***ing Jesus Christ and being butt-f***ed by Donald Rumsfeld [in the Western press]?" Can you imagine that being printed in a large-circulation newspaper in the United States? Another factor is the very high rate of unionisation in Sweden (something like 80% of workers are in unions). The new government will attack this by raising the cost of membership, but you still get your unemployment pay via the union, if you're unemployed, which is why everyone is in a union. The unions in Sweden are very good at collective action, and won't be afraid to use their strength. Another factor is the basic divisions which exist within the coalition. What happened last time was that everyone wanted to spend money, but no-one wanted to raise it. I see no evidence that the same thing won't happen this time too. There'll be privatisation to try to raise money, but there's a limit to how far that can go. The ideologues on the right are convinced that the 'market' is just waiting in the wings, ready to take the Swedish economy to a promised land, but this is, of course, far from the case. When the right won control of our county council last time, they tried to privatise one of the local hospitals … and then discovered that all these entrepreneurs aren't interested in small local hospitals. Their only interest is in a couple of hospitals in the middle of Stockholm. The Social Democrats privatised the national telecom company a couple of years ago … and found that the take-up of the shares was very disappointing. Contrary to many people's expectations, there's not as much state ownership as you might think in Sweden. Generally, the state has limited itself to 'levelling the playing field' and has subsidised private companies to provide a service. The introduction of 3G telephones in Sweden was a case in point. The state didn't run an auction of wavelengths as happened in nearly all the other countries in Europe. Instead they *gave* them away for free … but only to companies who both promised to, and were adjudged to be able to, actually build the systems. The result was that now, three years later, Sweden has 3G telephones, whilst most of the rest of Europe doesn't, since their auctions resulted in the telecom companies almost bankrupting themselves … and not having any money left over to actually build the systems they'd won the concession to run. This relative lack of state assets makes it extremely difficult for a right-wing government to raise temporary revenues (say up to the next election) by selling off the family silver.

There are already some signs that reality is beginning to affect the new Swedish government. It'll be interesting to see how they deal with it. One comparison I draw is with Turkey - also missed out on WW2, also has a difficult geographical position, also has a difficult climate, also commanding natural resources for which there are plenty of alternative sources of supply. Why was Sweden's post-war fate so different from Turkey's? One explanation is the politics of post-war Swedish governments (pre-war Sweden was still one of Europe's poorer countries, with people dying of starvation as recently as 1919, to judge from some of the letters Swedish emigrants received from home which I've translated for Americans). If you're going to turn everything over to the 'free market' (which isn't free and isn't a market, but that's another matter), then you really need to accept Turkish levels of prosperity. There's a tension within the Swedish employers' organisation between the politicised leadership, who want to do away with labour laws in Sweden and allow, say, Latvian companies paying Latvian wages to compete with Swedish ones on the home market, and the broad mass of the organisation's members who realise that their companies would rapidly go out of business. The new government would like, ideologically, to go along with the 'free marketeers', but the consequences of such actions are very close to hand, when you live in a small country like Sweden. You can surely make Swedish labour cheaper … but you can't make it cheap enough to compete with China, unless Swedes are prepared to live like Chinese people - and even then, the geographical position and climate of Sweden would make it unprofitable to set up in Sweden, instead of, say, Malaysia. The autumn round of pay negotiations starts next month. The unions have already started saying that they're going to try to claw back from the employers any increases in things like union fees or decreases in social benefits. And the employers can forget about three-year agreements (one of the factors which provides for stability in the Swedish economy … which is also one of the reasons why Sweden is a very attractive place for foreign investors). Last time the political parties who're now in charge ran the country, we got 500% interest rates within one year of them taking office, and in three years they built up a foreign debt mountain that still isn't paid off. I'm not very optimistic that we're going to avoid that this time.

Sweden's always been a very divided country - which might seem strange to an outsider. In this election the difference between winning and losing was 1.9%. Since Sweden uses PR, this is a fairly 'real' 1.9% (parties which get less than 4% of the total vote are eliminated, which has amounted to around 5% altogether on this poll). Persson's market-oriented policies definitely made it difficult for the Social Democrats to mobilise their vote … and the right played their hand very carefully, by not really making it clear what they intended to do if they won power. My own estimation is that we're in for a period of hard right policies for four years, since, despite the image they've tried to convey, the 'Moderates' are far from that. Sweden used to be a very 'Germanic' country before the Second World War, and never really went through anything like 'denazification'. In 1938, Sweden was stamping 'Jew' in the Swedish passports of Swedish citizens who happened to be Jewish, in order to assist the German authorities … during the war, many escapees from Norway were handed back to the Germans by the local border police in Värmland … and on May 8th, 1945, the portraits of Hitler came down off the walls … and the whole question wasn't spoken of again. The right in Sweden still act on the basis that what the people of Sweden need is a bit of iron (market?) discipline … and it's been very hard for them to accept that policies based on collective solutions, rather than individual ones have actually delivered the goods. In my local county, Kalmar, the left increased its share of the vote, and it looks like the county government (which basically handles health care and culture) will tip back over the knife-edge in favour of the left. Last time, the right ran the county and promptly embarked on an extensive process of privatisation … which ended rather lamely, when they discovered that there weren't any private entrepreneurs who *wanted* to take over the hospitals! Big, rich hospitals in Stockholm were OK, but who wants small ones in rural areas? After that diversion, they quietly took up the plan that the departing left had prepared and it turned out to be quite a success. The town of Kalmar also went left quite strongly. My favourite local election experience was when I was outside the polling station yesterday (I think I've told this forum I'm a member of the Social Democrats), together with a prominent local 'Moderate'. We got to talking about this huge investment a Chinese company are making in an exhibition centre here. The Chinese company are planning to build housing for about 1000 employees too (which will earn Kalmar a hefty sum in local government grants). The Moderate lady told me in a hushed voice that, you know, the Chinese are only allowed to have one child back in China, so what's to stop them from breeding like rabbits the minute they get the chance. "I'm only saying, do we have the maternity beds for all these Chinese? I'm telling that you that we haven't!" That's about the level of reasoning I'm expecting from the new government in more or less all areas of policy! Still … we know what's likely to happen, since we've been through this before: four years of right-wing squabbling and wasting of public money, which will end in massive debt … and about 10 years of left-wing governments who'll have to spend their time clearing up the mess.

I went to a grammar school in Harrow (no, not Harrow School!), and the girls' sweater could only be bought from a shop in Devon! Needless to say, the school 'helped' parents by making a bulk order for the extremely over-priced sweaters. Nowadays we don't have this problem - both our kids go to schools in Sweden. The argument about uniforms helping to avoid the problem of competition between pupils when it comes to clothes doesn't really apply. There was just as much competition when I went to school … but it was over more subtle details, like the particular brand of white shirt or socks you wore. The actual uniform was more or less irrelevant to this competition - it was much more yet another attempt at social control of pupils. Maybe that's why pupils in systems with uniforms are that much more rebellious - they've got something right in front of their noses every morning to rebel against.

Don't worry, Andy, IQ will come around again - anything to try to find some way of checking on the performance of schools without actually involving the teachers.

One of the interesting phenomena (for me, at least) about the current military campaign in southern Afghanistan is the apparent inability of the United States to get NATO countries to commit soldiers and equipment to the fight. I've just read an account of the ructions at the NATO summit in Poland, where extreme pressure has apparently been brought to bear on Germany and France in particular to send helicopters and soldiers to reinforce the few thousand NATO soldiers in the south - thus far to no avail. I'm sure that previous US administrations would not have been submitted to this public humiliation. On the other hand, perhaps previous administrations would not have been in the position of asking the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to fight on the borders of Pakistan … I wonder if this lack of ability of the Americans to enforce their will on their European allies will prove to be long-lasting, and spill over into other areas of policy.

Without getting into the substantive question in this thread … I was watching the History Channel last night and the programme was about Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge. The speaker mentioned, almost casually, that half a million Cambodians were killed in the bombing campaign that succeeded the signing of the Peace Treaty with the North Vietnamese in 1973. The USAF devoted the resources which were now no longer bombing in Vietnam to systematically eradicating small towns and villages near provincial towns held by the Lon Nol government. Half a million … "that's a whole lotta stiffs" (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) - that'd be the equivalent of about 20 million Americans pro rata (I think the population of Cambodia at the time was about 6 million and that of the USA about 240 million). But Nixon, as we know, "was an honourable man" (at least in the rehabilitated form of his last years) - to quote Shakespeare.

China's a hot topic here in Kalmar too. A Chinese company has just announced plans to build an enormous exhibition centre here in little Kalmar, as a showcase for Chinese companies wanting to export to Europe. It'll be 400,000 square metres (four times as big as the newly-opened - and huge - IKEA store). Some local commentators wondered if it was all for real (a justifiable reaction) … but at the equivalent of about £10 million it isn't much of an investment for some Chinese companies. The province which is in the hinterland of Shanghai has had a manned trade office here in Kalmar for over a year now too. (For the many of you who have no idea where and what Kalmar is, it's a small town on the east coast of southern Sweden. The population is 60,000 and what industry there is here is largely light manufacturing. Imagine a place in your own country of about the same size, but a good way off the beaten track - like Grimsby in the UK - and you've got Kalmar in Sweden.)

… but bear in mind the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. They set up the puppet SLA (South Lebanese Army) in order to make the area south of the Litani River into a permanent buffer zone. Whilst they were there, it looked like they'd stay forever, but when their power collapsed, it collapsed suddenly and almost without any warnings that reached outsiders. The same could well happen in Iraq … especially if the US are dumb enough to attack Iran or to allow Israel to attack Iran. If that happens, we'll find out very quickly just how 'moderate' the moderate Shiites are!

Don't give up on us yet, Andy! Remember that it's the school holidays nearly everywhere but Scandinavia (we've just gone back), so I'm sure there'll be more people discussing education again soon.

I understand the aim of your proposal, Sid, but I wonder how 'wieldy' it would be. I happen to have met both John and Andy personally in Gothenburg, but it was only by a sort of chance. We did actually have a chance to do more than exchange greetings … but not a great deal more than that. I'm not all that certain how much more authentic I became in the moderators' eyes after we met than I was before, in other words. I run into this sort of problem in my work as a distance teacher on wholly Web-based courses. How do you know that the student whose work you're marking is the same person as the one who gets the ultimate grades? One day we may have on-line IDs which are secure and personal, but we're not there yet. However, in any situation where there's interaction on a personal level and over a period of time, it's quite difficult for someone to be consistently false. (On courses you notice immediately if there's a sudden change in the way someone expresses themselves, for example, rather on the lines of the impossibility of faking large numbers of figures in false book-keeping - when we human beings fake, we still do it in ways which show.) The other consideration is what the consequence of misrepresentation would be. With this forum, I feel that the reactions and responses of other members are a better safeguard against falsity than a system of 'grading' membership. However, I may be wrong … !

I've just read a disturbing article on the BBC website about Blackboard's lawsuit against Desire2Learn. Apparently, Blackboard were granted a very far-reaching multi-national US patent in July which they're now using against their competitors, claiming that a host of common features of LMSs are actually Blackboard patents. Here's the original BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4790485.stm and here's the No Educational Patents site: http://noedupatents.org/ I'm no *great* fan of LMSs myself, but, at first reading, Blackboard's claims do seem a bit absurd.

I got into trouble with our Business Administration teachers by saying at a conference that questions with answers were too simple for university level - we should only handle questions that don't have answers! They'd just been spending months and pots of money trying to get students to revise for their exams earlier than the night before the exam. (The idea of taking a long hard look at how they were organising their courses and at what kind of examinations they were running was ruled out of court, since, as we all know, Business Administration lecturers are just, well, perfect in every respect already.) They came up with the great idea of having regular quizzes … but then realised that these would need to be on-line, or their lecturers would spend all their time marking quizzes. So they spent lots of money writing multiple-choice quizzes which the students would take. The first problem they ran into was entrepreneurship - a budding captain of industry simply printed out the tests and sold the correct answers to his course colleagues! Then they tried random tests … and discovered that students were logging on and then logging off a few minutes later without completing the quiz. Guess what! The students had worked out that quiz-writing is actually really difficult, if you're going to do it properly. If you don't (and very few academics have any idea about how to test accurately), you're likely to produce quizzes with very wide variations in the level of difficulty. So the smart students were trying the quizzes out until they found one that was relatively easy. Still, everyone's happy. The Business Administration department can point to an enormous expenditure on IT development, which shows that they're really cutting-edge, and the students can keep on doing what their subject teachers tell them is rational human behaviour: getting the maximum return for the minimum amount of input. Just goes to show that the market really works!

I've faced just this situation in designing both straight on-line courses, like Business Writing, and more conventional distance courses in academic English when 'remote' students have started taking the course from places like Hong Kong. A typical initial question from within the university is 'how many lectures are there?' Now there is a certain amount of factual information that needs to be transmitted, and some kind of oral presentation is sometimes the most appropriate way of transmitting it. There's also a point, especially with academic courses, in preparing students for the kind of lecturing they'd receive if they continued at higher levels, but one of the key concepts any distance student has to grasp and accept is that 'all' I can do is teach - the learning they have to take care of themselves. In practical terms, the need for lecturing is often taken care of by podcasts, whilst video conferences of various types are occasions for me to try to create environments where students can grasp and develop the idea that learning is both an individual and collaborative process which they have to be in control of. The exact types of examination arise out of the general organisation of the course. Some aspects lend themselves to 'sit-down' examinations, whilst others require other forms, such as the test of their ability of pronounce English which takes place on the phone (landline, mobile or VoIP). As you can imagine, this style of course design only works if you are willing to trust the teachers and Internet tutors to rely on their professional judgement in doing the job of teaching and examining - the whole pedagogical environment just doesn't lend itself to the more mechanical, centrally-controlled systems that have been the only permitted norm in the UK for the last 22 or so years. Or, to put it another way, if you try to replace teacher and examiner professionalism with central micro-management, it's no wonder you run into problems with coursework.

I think it's also important to realise that notions of black and Asian people being somehow inferior as an entire group are fairly modern notions, dating from around the time when Europeans developed such seaworthy ships and powerful weapons (together with improved military tactics) that they could defeat more or less anyone else on the planet. As European powers started to subjugate people from other parts of the world, it became important to create an ideology which would back this subjugation up. One of the interesting features of most of the Gulf Arab states is that the 'native' population is made up of very diverse 'racial groups'. You'll find plenty of Saudis with very African appearances, who co-exist with Saudis who look very European and others who look very 'Arab'. The explanation is that if slaves embraced Islam they could be freed under certain circumstances, and once you were a free man, who believed in Islam, you had to be treated as an equal of all others. This integration took place in the period of our Middle Ages, so it's had plenty of time to become permanent. (The 'European' Saudis are descended from slaves taken from the north, by the way).