David Richardson

One of the points I have to make to both US and Swedish students on US Culture and Society courses is what I call the 'red shift' in US politics. By European standards, the Democrats are not a left-wing party. What are called 'neo-conservatives' in the US have long been called 'neo-liberals' in Europe, and 'Liberal' parties all over Europe are parties of the right. So … if you want to resemble a moderate European social democrat in the United States, you have to place yourself in a position that will be locally labelled 'extreme left-wing'! This didn't happen by accident - the US had 'real' left-wing political movements, but they were systematically crushed at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century (look into what General Pershing was doing in the 1920s, for example). The tactics used were very similar to the ones used in countries like Belorussia today. E.g. you don't actually ban demonstrations - just demonstrators. If Europeans ever wonder why demonstrators in the US walk round and round in circles, rather than just standing still, it's because of one of the sets of laws passed in the 19th century to prevent people from gathering in free political associations.

I'd be happy to participate in a discussion … but I'm going to have to read the book first! I'll ask at our local library (it'd be good to read it in Swedish first). One of my standard questions to students on a US Culture and Society course is "which political party in Sweden is most influenced by the USA?" It'd be easy to assume that it must be one of the right-wing parties, but, for my money, they're much more influenced by Germany. My answer is "the Social Democrats". If you look around in Sweden, they tried to create a very 'American' society after the war - in the best senses of the word. I.e. a society where class differences don't matter, and where anyone can be Prime Minister! Whether they succeeded is another question! So … it wouldn't surprise me at all if Palme had CIA links. The Social Democrats were fanatical anti-Communists through the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, and set up all sorts of McCarthy-ite mechanisms to 'root out Communists'. Palme was one of the prime instigators of the principal one, the IB, which was exposed by two journalists in the 1970s, both of whom were sent briefly to prison for their revelations.

Don't get the Brits started! Basically, the answer is yes. One parallel between the Republicans in the US and the Conservatives in the UK is that they both see themselves as the 'natural party of government', thus making any opposition to anything they want to do as de facto illegitimate, no matter what the basis for the opposition. Mrs Thatcher's Conservatives felt that anything they did was OK, so they weren't averse to diverting public funds the way of their supporters. One of the first ways this was felt was on the level of petty local corruption. I remember a gushing article in the Sunday Telegraph magazine in about 1981, entitled 'Mrs Thatcher's New Millionaires', describing the fortunes of people who had made a million pounds since 1979 when Mrs Thatcher's government took office. When you looked at these stories in detail, 9 out of the 10 had made their money by tapping into the public purse and siphoning off as much as they wanted. One scam was to open a social security hostel for people who were on benefits, but had nowhere to live. You'd buy up a slum property and put a whole family in one small room. A packet of Cornflakes each week and a couple of pints of milk meant that you were offering 'bed and breakfast accommodation', which the Social Services were instructed (by Whitehall) to treat as full-time accommodation subject to pay-outs of very large sums of money each week. Then you throw the family out at about 7 am each morning and keep the doors locked until after 6 pm … minimal cleaning and maintenance … and you're a millionaire! This kind of corruption was mirrored in the provision of beds in private old peoples' homes, private schools, 'job training' for the unemployed, etc, etc. It's one of the reasons why the British economy did so badly in the early 1980s (whenever you read something about how well the economy did under Thatcher, look for the starting date for the comparison - it's usually about 1983 … not 1979 when she came into power). We were paying very large sums of money for much poorer services. In my view there were two aims for this policy: to frighten the poor into acquiescing to the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich; and to enrich buddies and supporters. If you've been following John Simkin's thread on corruption under Blair, you can see that the modus operandi Thatcher started has just been emulated by New Labour … depressing, isn't it.

Funnily enough, I listened to an interview today with the Swedish naval officer who was first aboard the Soviet submarine. The Soviets and the Swedes had to communicate in German, and the first question from the Soviets was "Wo sind wir?" (Where are we?). They might have been bluffing, but there's at least a chance the Soviet story of poor navigation was right. The Swedes have been cooperating with NATO for a very long time, though. The Swedish DC3 which was shot down (in 1952?) by a Soviet MiG was carrying out an intelligence mission for the British and the Americans (which is why the Soviets shot it down), but under the cover of Swedish neutrality. Sweden was a very Germanic country through most of the 19th and some of the 20th centuries. The first foreign language was German, and the Swedish upper classes always looked to Germany for inspiration. This came to an abrupt end on May 8th 1945! However, the upper classes in Sweden have always been a problem for democratically-elected Swedish governments. Per-Albin Hansson's (the wartime Swedish Prime Minister) great feat during WW2 was preventing the Army from intervening … on the side of the Germans (with support from the then King of Sweden). As I've posted before, I've met quite a few old men who have told me how their unit in the army up on one of the borders nominated someone to shoot the officer in the event of a German invasion, so that he wouldn't just surrender. In Värmland there were many refugees from occupied Norway who were just handed back to the Germans by the local police (because of local Nazi sympathies). This habit of subverting the will of the elected government has continued right up to the present day …

My dad was in the 5/7 Lancers during WW2 (… and my granddad fought at the Somme, but that's another story). The way he tells it, the 5/7 Lancers had a stroke of luck in North Africa. Early in the campaign, Rommel led the regiment into a fairly elementary trap and captured just about all of it. Rommel decided to keep the important members of the regiment as POWs and give the rubbish back to the British, so they could feed and water them. Unfortunately for the Germans, they had too romantic a picture of the British, so they kept the officers and sent the NCOs and privates back to the British. The British Army were forced to promote many of the NCOs, so that by the time the pre-war officers were liberated from POW camps in Germany in 1945, the Colonel then had been the pre-war Colonel's batman (personal servant). My dad was a Sergeant commanding a Churchill Crocodile tank. This was a heavy tank, which pulled a trailer full of napalm, designed to cause dug-in infantry (who lacked anti-tank weapons, since the trailer was a sitting target!) to surrender. He was sent over to Normandy a week after D-Day and his unit fought from there to Denmark. The few times he went into action, it worked like clockwork. Two tanks would approach a German line advancing alternately until they were close enough to send out a burst of flame. The Germans promptly surrendered (who wants to be burnt to death?), and the infantry behind the tanks walked forward and collected their weapons. Once they were being followed by a joint US-British force, and the Americans decided to show the British who was best, so they faced ahead of the tanks. The Germans promptly mowed them down with machine guns … Most often, though, my dad and his unit waited 200 metres behind the advance, because the British officers commanding the infantry thought it was unsporting to use flame-throwers. He'd often hear a couple of public schoolboys betting that 'our chaps'll get there before your chaps'. A quarter of an hour later, he'd see the casualties being brought past. BTW, when the 5/7 Lancers' pre-war officers *were* released, the British Army promptly transferred the successful military leaders and replaced them with the fools who were outsmarted by Rommel in 1941. Fortunately, the war had progressed so far by then that these clowns couldn't do too much damage. My grandad, BTW, ended WW1 as a sergeant too, having fought in every major battle from Gallipoli to the German offensive of April 1918 (as Orwell said, who remembers the battles in which the Allies actually *beat* the Germans?). That was quite an achievement, since he was in an Irish regiment (and the Irish were always given front-row seats at any battle!). I'm not a pacifist as such, but I'm very glad that the UK doesn't have conscription. If it had, I'd have spent a lot of my twenties avoiding having anything to do with the clowns who run the British Army. I'm far from sure that the Battle of the Somme was a historical aberration - it looks to me much more like the British Army norm.

Inspiration is a nice mind-mapping programme, which I suppose would work on IWBs. There are various versions, from a Kids version to a 'serious' businesspersons version. The company's home page is at: http://www.inspiration.com PS. The Gröna Lund Hendrix concert was shut down in the middle by the caretakers because the band were playing too loud - that's the story anyway.

Sorry … it was one of the last years of the 1960s, then.

Jimi Hendrix played in Stockholm in the early 1970s, and if you count the number of people who *say* they were there, it's a great deal more than the capacity of the hall he played in! In other words, there's a great difference between the way the 1970s really *were* and the way they're represented now - just like any other historical period, actually. The 1970s weren't a time for ideologues, in my personal experience. The world of education was just as hide-bound then as it sometimes is now … and just as 'revolutionary' as it sometimes is now. The way I see the conflict that this thread has aroused is as a reflection of an age-old problem of education. In just about every profession you can think of, the managers know more about what's going on than the people who're at whatever 'sharp end' that profession has. Thus senior consultants in hospitals know more than junior doctors, factory managers know more than production line workers, etc. It's not like that in education, though. Becoming a manager means leaving the 'sharp end', usually permanently. And teaching skills lose their edge if they're not used - quite quickly, too (which is why I'm thankful that I have plenty of opportunities to teach whilst I'm doing teacher training and in-service training). In my experience, educational managers generally can't cope with this situation. I remember one in my career who could, but he was really a coach company manager, and thus had a much more realistic view of the enterprise! One great temptation for these managers, then, is to find some area where they *can* be the experts and tell these upstart teachers what they're to do. This is my explanation for the constant promotion of teaching by machine. If teaching and learning is actually the intimate exchange between teachers, learners and materials which real teachers know that it is, educational managers feel left out … so how nice for them to be able to deny it, and bring on the machine that will fulfil the goal … that's designed so that it can only be fulfilled by the machine! The sad thing is that Roy seems to have a lot of very interesting and valid things to say. I'm on this thread really only because I had the chance to get over to Gothenburg last year and present a few ideas about distance education. It seems to me, as an 'outsider', that all you need to do, Roy, is chill out. Speaking for myself, I'm not criticising your practices or calling into question your experiences, but simply trying to put them in a broader historical context. I got out of education in the UK as long ago as 1980 - my explanation is that I could see the writing on the wall! That writing said, then, "we prefer conformity to truth" … which is a great slogan for a bureaucracy, but a poor one for an educational system. So, yes, let's talk about IWBs and how they can be used … but let's not ignore the context in which they're used too.

I've been having great fun doing team podcasts, using Gizmo (one of these voice-over-internet programmes) to record a conference call between several teachers in different places. One hit this spring was when Jon Clark in Valladolid, Spain and I in Kalmar, Sweden linked up to discuss how students typically tackled various tasks on the Business Writing course, and what sort of things the tutors were looking for. Bryan Carter and Kathy McCormick in Warrensburg, Missouri and I have regularly linked up to discuss different aspects of writing academic essays for our students in Warrensburg and southern Sweden respectively. I'm a distance teacher more or less all the time … and I'm amazed at how many misconceptions there are among non-distance teachers about what is actually involved. I usually have to point out at some stage in the conversation that if all your pupils are in the same room more or less all the time, then it isn't a distance course! What you are doing with team podcasts, for example, is bringing resources from where they happen to be in the world into your classroom in particularly vivid ways. There are advantages to both 'real time' systems, like desktop video conferencing systems (I've written quite widely elsewhere on the Forum about this), and of 'asynchronous' systems like podcasting. My aim as a teacher is always to make the pedagogical activity going on decide what technology is used and how, rather than the other way round.

I think that language teachers must be the most difficult audience when it comes to trying to get across the virtues of a teaching machine. We've heard it all before … when tape recorders came along, and then language labs. Generally speaking, there was a massive amount of investment in machines (instead of in people), and the promises that were made were fantastic. You can perhaps understand why we're so sceptical about IWBs. One of the problems with audio-visual presentations is Hollywood. Our pupils and students have been brought up on spectacular visual effects … and these cost millions. I coined an IT phrase once, SPIP (something posh to impress the punters), and I've produced a couple of spips (at the behest of others) to show what an interactive exercise could look like. One in particular would take students about 15 minutes to do - and they'd do something useful (even though I say who designed it). It cost about £15,000 about five years ago. It's only ever been used to demonstrate the wonder of IT in education. Now it's in the nature of the computer hardware industry that you end up being able to do better things for less money all the time … but the competition for our pupils' visual and auditory attention is also pretty strong. The question is whether even the fanciest IWB presentation would ever be worth the investment (compared, say, to using the classroom for face-to-face contact between people). One point I often make when I'm talking about ICT in education is that we usually concentrated on the 'information' and the 'technology', but forget the 'communication'. Now, linking up an IWB in a classroom in England, where there's a lesson going on about Nazi Germany, with an ex-member of the Nazi party sitting in Germany, who's able to tell the pupils why he joined in the first place, and what the atmosphere was like at the time … now that's what I'd call a good use for a machine. It might even incline the pupils not to drop modern languages at the age of 14 - and then Graham would be happy too!

It'll be interesting to see whether Sweden or England are keen on playing against Germany in the next round …

One of my main reservations about the use of PowerPoint is that you can only really use all the features in it if you've got a data projector … which means quite a hefty investment in each individual classroom … which means in turn the skewing of investment in the school as a whole when so much money is channelled into bricks and mortar that are only in use for a limited number of hours in the day (but have to be funded 24/7/365). And then there's the way PowerPoint distorts and distracts from proper thinking. I'm just grading portfolios created by primary school teachers who've been on a language didactics course this spring, and a couple of them have included print-outs from PowerPoint/IWB presentations about … parts of speech. Well, yes, they've produced some nice-looking stuff about nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs … but, sorry, for the kind of young language learners we're talking about, this is a dangerous distraction from the real business of learning. The kids definitely filled out all the answers right in the worksheets … but, at best, they'll have learned nothing about how to use English. Typically (looking at the results when they finally arrive at university), they'll have actively worsened their understanding of the language. IWB's don't mess up pupil's heads - teachers do (to paraphrase the NRA slogan!), but IWBs surely seem to help.

Being a republican, I reckon I must be immune to stories about Princess Diana. I feel sorry for the lass, since I reckon she had a bit of a wasted life … but I really reckon that this case has been investigated about as much as it needs to be. The British Establishment is definitely corrupt enough to want to nobble Diana, and is definitely incompetent enough to screw up the aftermath of a death by explainable causes … but that doesn't amount to a conspiracy in my book.

As a university teacher, I'm actually quite pleased that plagiarism is so easy on the Internet. As Graham says, it's the nature of the tasks which lends itself to plagiarism that is the real problem. However, if you change the nature of the tasks, you also change the relationships between teachers-learners-subject material. And just as we can see that 'subject materials' have become more and more diverse (i.e. you don't just get one text book which covers the whole course any more), so have the functions of teaching and learning. The 'teacher' on a course isn't always going to be the person who's job title is 'teacher'. We have one of these 'automatic' systems for checking whether a submitted text was plagiarised. The procedure, as was explained to us teachers, was that students submit their essays to the system, which then flags any correspondences with other texts on the system's database. The teacher would then check these correspondences, and, if they were evidence of plagiarism, report the student to the Disciplinary Committee! My suggestion was that we should just report the student as soon as flags came up … and the response from the bureaucrats was "Oh, they're far too busy to deal with each case like that" (i.e. we aren't!). Guess who doesn't use the plagiarism check system. The heart of this question for me is that we're in transition from an industrialised, simplistic, mass education system to a niche-based individualistic one, which uses technology in order to provide individual attention. So long as teachers keep behaving as if they were living in the 19th century, 21st century technology will make their lives difficult.

I'm all in favour of compulsory religion in schools. In my opinion, nothing has contributed more to the spread of atheism amongst British pupils!

This is a bit of a tricky one, isn't it. Swedish pupils used to regularly visited by the 'fluortant' (fluoride lady) who would make them all swill their mouths with a fluoride solution for three minutes. When this was stopped, dental health promptly deteriorated … Good nutrition, school dinners, etc, etc, seem to result in very healthy children here too. When we get children's clothes from England, we have to ask the family to buy the size for the *next* year, since our 'Swedish' children are just that much bigger than their English equivalents. I wonder if fish oil is the right thing to be distributing, though. Free school milk, anyone?

Just to add a bit of perspective. The local ward organisation of the Kalmar Socialdemokraterna to which I pay my subscription has 155 members, of whom more than 70 regularly turn up to meetings. We have a local organisation of 15 'träskoansvariga' ('clog managers' - though why they're called that, I have no idea!) who distribute newsletters in their area (partly so that we save on postage, but mostly so that there's regular contact between the ward organisation and the local members). Our ward covers about 8,000 of the 60,000 people who live in Kalmar. The older members think this situation is terrible - we ought to have at least 250 members, according to them. However, the two local parties I was in when I was a member of the Labour Party, Dartford and Ealing North, would have been extremely happy to have this number of active members … and those two districts both have something like 100,000 people living in them. This is what the road back would look like for New Labour, in my opinion.

I noticed that this tendency really took off during Thatcher's period in office. Remember Erica Roe? (Streaked at Twickers). That happened just as the economic effects of Thatcher's first year in office were beginning to hit the headlines big time. There were some key economic indicators being reported … and papers like the Mail kept the Roe story going for days and days. My theory is that one of the reasons for the implosion of 'respect' for the British Royal Family is the fact that after May 1979, the evening television news (ITN in particular) started having a compulsory story every single night about the Royal Family (just like they with the leaders of Third World dictatorships - I must have seen hundreds of 'news' items about the Saudi royals, for example). Even if the Windsors had been scintillatingly interesting people (!), they wouldn't have been able to sustain the flow of stories that long, without all the dirty laundry eventually being dug out and exposed to the light. And the Windsors happen to have plenty of this. Remember life before paparazzis? I do.

… and that was Trinidad with only 10 men in the second half. I reckon that the current Swedish team is overrated. Sweden's often had quite an easy route to qualification (Moldova and Azerbaijan, for example), and they often fail when they meet real opposition. They might get lucky against Paraguay on Thursday, but I wouldn't be surprised if they get a surprise instead - Paraguay are quite a good team, actually.

Don't you lot get it? Svennis is Sweden's secret 5th columnist, trying to make sure that Sweden qualify for the next round!

As a member of Socialdemokraterna, let me endorse John's that the Swedish party is still a socialist party. There's a clear ideological difference being highlighted by the current Swedish election campaign, where the bourgeois parties (as are called all the parties which are not on the left - the British Liberal Democrats would figure in that group …) are trying to talk up a mass of 'problems' the Swedish economy allegedly suffers from, such as the fact that people who're worn out by work can get early retirement on fairly generous terms. It's a gift to a party that's still fairly true to its socialist origins, which is why the opinion polls are looking so good for the Socialdemokraterna right now. There are two Swedish practices which might really benefit the UK political system: collective ministerial responsibility and the taboo against 'ministerstyre'. The first means that individual ministers can't be sacked - you either sack the entire government, or you rely on the government to police itself. In effect, it means that the Prime Minister accepts ultimate responsibility for everything the government does, and that individual ministers agree not to break ranks, once a policy has been decided on. If they feel they can't do this, then they are more or less obliged to resign their posts. The second is a very long-standing tradition in Swedish government, going right back to the 1600s. Ministers in Sweden aren't allowed to actively intervene in the actions of their departments on the level of individual actions or the treatment of individuals. If they are suspected of doing this, they get called up before the Constitutional Committee. A clear-cut verdict against them is a resigning matter. The criticism of Thomas Bodström, the Home Secretary, over the Pirate Bay raid is that he took orders from the Americans and proceeded to implement them with direct instructions to the local police in Gothenburg. If there were any suspicion of this, he'd be in deep trouble (which is why he's claiming that he heard first about the raids on Text TV …).

As a member of Socialdemokraterna, let me endorse John's that the Swedish party is still a socialist party. There's a clear ideological difference being highlighted by the current Swedish election campaign, where the bourgeois parties (as are called all the parties which are not on the left - the British Liberal Democrats would figure in that group …) are trying to talk up a mass of 'problems' the Swedish economy allegedly suffers from, such as the fact that people who're worn out by work can get early retirement on fairly generous terms. It's a gift to a party that's still fairly true to its socialist origins, which is why the opinion polls are looking so good for the Socialdemokraterna right now. There are two Swedish practices which might really benefit the UK political system: collective ministerial responsibility and the taboo against 'ministerstyre'. The first means that individual ministers can't be sacked - you either sack the entire government, or you rely on the government to police itself. In effect, it means that the Prime Minister accepts ultimate responsibility for everything the government does, and that individual ministers agree not to break ranks, once a policy has been decided on. If they feel they can't do this, then they are more or less obliged to resign their posts. The second is a very long-standing tradition in Swedish government, going right back to the 1600s. Ministers in Sweden aren't allowed to actively intervene in the actions of their departments on the level of individual actions or the treatment of individuals. If they are suspected of doing this, they get called up before the Constitutional Committee. A clear-cut verdict against them is a resigning matter. The criticism of Thomas Bodström, the Home Secretary, over the Pirate Bay raid is that he took orders from the Americans and proceeded to implement them with direct instructions to the local police in Gothenburg. If there were any suspicion of this, he'd be in deep trouble (which is why he's claiming that he heard first about the raids on Text TV …).

Don't underestimate the 'home country' effect, though. I reckon they'll make it to the semi-finals.

We also have to bear in mind that much of this debate is really about the fairly primitive state computers are still in. I often make the analogy with the car industry in its early days. In my opinion, computers are still at the Model T Ford stage, where you had to start it with a handle, and know a lot about how the engine worked just to be able to drive it. We might be at the Morris Minor stage soon (with a heater as an optional extra!), but we're a long way from Toyota Corolla! When computers have really big hard disks, a proper amount of RAM, and we have networks which run at a normal speed (instead of really slowly), then I think much of the debate will be over, and we'll be facing lots of other challenges. One of the most important of these new challenges is going to be about the role of teachers in the learning process. We who use computers a lot have already been exposed to the change from teacher as 'sage on the stage' to 'guide on the side', but, let's face it, we're a tiny minority. But I think this change is coming to everyone in the classroom, and quite soon too. One of the questions I'm contemplating at the moment is what happens when 'push' becomes 'pull' in education. I'm referring to the way 'push' marketing decides what consumers are going to buy and they pushes it at them (the way CDs are sold) as opposed to 'pull' marketing where consumers find out about the product themselves and buy it in a way they want to (the way music download services, such as iTunes, work). We're discussing the Bologna process a lot here in Swedish higher education at the moment, but no-one's really thought about what happens when students look at our 'learning outcomes', decide to achieve them in their own idiosyncratic ways, and then apply to gain the credits without necessarily having studied 'our' courses. BTW, the American branch of Apple have just produced 'iTunes U', which allows students at universities which have bought it to download lectures, lecture notes, on-line materials, etc the way they download tracks from iTunes (and allows the universities to charge them on a piece-by-piece basis, if they want to).

I think Graham has a very good point here. My students conform to the Swedish profile for on-line students: largely women, in their mid-30s to mid-40s, with jobs, houses, and/or businesses and a VVV (villa-Volvo-vovve or house-Volvo-dog!). They like simple sites, and they love podcasting (I have the results of a survey to prove it!). I think the key factor is that they know how to network, so networking via computers is simply an add-on to skills they already possess. I'm considering clicking on the 'Adverts' button for our course blogs … except that I don't think that it's very ethical for me as teacher to gain personally (even at the minimal advertising rates Google offer) from a site I require them as students to go to. I don't think they'd be put off by the fairly discreet sort of advertising The Education Forum carries … but it'd need to be geared to their interests. On the other hand, my students are very good at filtering out distractions - it's what most of them have to do all day long!