David Richardson

I've just described a technique I've been using on flexible learning courses on the Flexible Learning sub-forum, which might also be of interest to people wanting to ask experts things - and get a recording of the conversation out on the net. You'll find the posting at: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5559

I was up in Hultsfred on Saturday, and the people in the Study Centre proudly showed me the Marratech set-up at their end which Nancy has been using to teach people maths from her sick bed (see the other thread). It revealed another aspect of flexible learning - the one that appeals to politicians! Buying the equipment for even a small-scale studio video conference studio costs around 100,000 Swedish kronor. The equipment for a studio which will hold 30-50 people costs around 500,000 - 1 million kronor. Then, when you get going you have to have something called a bridge which links up several studios at a time, if you're going to do a multi-party video conference (point-to-point, the other alternative, is sometimes useful, but it's a bit of waste of resources to do the point-to-point conference several times over, rather than just linking the different sites up in the first place). The bridge server starts at around 500,000 Swedish kronor, and if you rent space on someone else's bridge, it costs 200 kronor per hour per site. The study centre in Hultsfred spent around 8,000 Swedish kronor on a fancy web cam and a couple of echo-cancelling mikes. They already had the projector to project the picture from Nancy up on to a screen, but the price of these is down around 15,000 - 20,000 Swedish kronor now … and, of course, you can use a projector for lots of other things than video conferences. Our Marratech licence (which is what allows multi-party conferences to take place) costs around 10,000 kronor per year per room, and we, of course, use each room for lots of things other than teaching. As you can see, the financial cost of using Marratech is very small, compared with the alternative. The spin-off for me as a teacher, though, is that Marratech is incredibly flexible - if I want to take in a student in Hong Kong, there's nothing to stop me, and the added costs are negligible. Thus, what's in the interests of the bureaucrats just happens also to be in my interest, for once!

It was actually the Kalmar-Missouri Composition Course partnership which was first off the blocks with joint podcasting. The site dedicated to it is at: http://www.humsam.hik.se/distans/convcomp/convcompstart.htm There's not much there yet, because my course doesn't start until next week, but you can hear our initial attempt. It wasn't easy finding the time to do the podcast, so we just had to do a quick 'lunch-hour' recording, and we'll need to decide on a common recording input level, but these are minor problems. What happens now with this technique here in Kalmar is that a colleague who teaches medical English is going to call some of her friends in the UK and record interviews, leading to a 'virtual hospital' site for her Kalmar students. The idea is that if you click on the orthopaedic clinic, you can hear a guided conversation with an orthopaedic nurse - with all the specialist vocabulary and jargon involved. Of course, you could do this the conventional way, with recording studios, etc. The problem is that this costs a lot of money … and tends not to be immediate and personal in the way that these joint podcasts are. Strictly speaking, by the way, the Conversations in Composition podcasts are genuine podcasts, since they are part of an on-going course, and will contain references to things that have happened this spring. The 'virtual hospital' idea is really something else - a collection of relevant sound recordings accessible via the net. This is a technique which the historians on this forum might be interested in too - the technical barriers to contacting someone with personal memories of historical events and recording what they say, no matter where in the world they happen to be, are almost non-existent. The personal, political, cultural and social barriers are another question, of course …

One area I'd look at to answer Jean's question is the general air of conformity within the teaching, curriculum-writing and textbook-producing communities. One of the problems with turning education into a commodity somewhere in the world is that the ethos of that kind of education tends to infect everywhere else too. There's a lot of talk about accountability … and the easiest way to be accountable is to produce something that is measurable to show to your accountants! This has meant that textbooks have tended to turn to exercises and questions with easy-to-define answers and outcomes … and it's a brave teacher who turns away from the textbook and challenges the simplistic thinking that a lot of educational administrators (and the politicians who're breathing down their necks) demand. My daughter's going through secondary school in Sweden, which also lacks league tables, grades (until the very end of the system), etc, and yet the teaching and testing in most of her subjects is more or less the same as in those systems which do have those things. One question I love putting to teacher trainers is "who decides on the pedagogical policy of your institution?" Sometimes I phrase it as "who decides how people learn things here?" My answer is "the caretakers" - because they're the ones who put the desks in rows, with the expert on a lectern at the front. Now, it's true that anyone *can* refurnish a room (I often start a session with teacher trainees by having them cart all the furniture out into the corridor, so that they can see what a classroom really is), but hardly anyone *does*. In other words, my answer to Jean's question could be formulated in this way too: tradition, and the power of the dominant ideology in the world.

Nancy's maths course has been working really well. I spent about two hours helping her to get going and she called me a couple of times during the next two days … and now she's into the second week of her intensive course, with rave reviews from a bunch of initially rather reluctant students. On my own courses, I feel that I'm tiptoeing towards 'type 2' course design. One of the few things that I ever got out of the great UKeu (Britains' e-university which collapsed in an expensive heap a while ago) is some research which classified e-learning courses as type 1 ('book in a box' - turning your Word documents into something your bosses could call web pages), type 2 (courses which start to exploit the potentialities of the technology) and type 3 (courses which go the whole hog with the technology). Type 1 courses are usually worse than the equivalent paper-based versions. Perhaps I'm being a bit hard on myself, but largely text-based interaction with students looks and feels like type 1 to me. This week we're doing our first multi-national podcast, as a supplement and complement to other types of on-line materials. Beth and I (at least - Bruce and Jon too, if we're lucky) are going to be meeting first on Marratech and then using Gizmo to record a joint podcast about what a Business Writing tutor does when the Send-In tasks start coming in. OK, a bit of explanation. Beth, Bruce and Jon are the team of internet tutors on our Business Writing course, who live in Auckland, NZ, Brisbane and Valladolid, respectively. We've been working together on this course and others for nearly 10 years now … which must make us one of the most experienced teams in the world. Marratech is our desktop video conference system (about which I've written in other fora) and Gizmo is an alternative to Skype, which has much better audio than Skype (uses the same audio programming as Marratech), and has a 'record call' function, which produces .wav files. You'll find Gizmo at http://www.gizmoproject.com The Business Writing course has been entirely on-line now since 1995. The students have loved it (the application figures are around 150 for 30 places each term) … but we've always felt that they'd get even more out of the course if they had more interaction with teachers and tutors. So, we're building in a Marratech session and a podcast to accompany each significant event on the course. I'm hoping, for example, to get an 'examiner's report' after each Send-In task from the tutors, to give students feedback on how the course is going as a whole. We've also dropped the discussion forum (it was subject to a hacker attack … but it was also a bit boring) in favour of a team blog. There's already been an interesting side-effect in that the blog has a much more well-developed space for a personal profile. It's interesting already to see the differences in the numbers of times a profile has been viewed between the more informative and open profiles and the ones which are less so. I think these beautiful friendships between students are sweet … but, cynically, they're also a powerful social 'glue' creating a feeling of community between disparate students and then maintaining it. BTW, if you want to take a look at the (rather crude) website, the course will be up and running for this term on 1st February. Click on the Distance Courses link at the top of this page, and then on Active Course Sites -> Business Writing.

Another problem I have with the whole 'learning styles' movement is the nature of the tests which have been devised in order to decide which learning styles a particular pupils has. Basically, the ones I've seen are so badly-designed that you can't draw any sensible conclusions from them. Dr Dunn at that conference described how her team had set about trying to discover what kinds of learning styles children with attention-deficiency problems had. At that time in Sweden there was a crude 10-question test which ordinary teachers were expected to administer. Some of the questions were things like "Does the child find it difficult to keep still?" and if you answered 'yes' to four of them, the kid had ADHD! You might just as well use a 'survey' from a magazine for teenagers (along the 'How sexy are you?' lines). Dr Dunn's methodology was to find 1500 subjects who'd had CAT scans which had identified physical changes in the structure of the brain before they even started to test them. In other words, her team was performing scientific studies, which were peer-reviewed and falsifiable. If we had similarly well-constructed tests to identify learning styles for the general population, there might be some point to them (although it still begs the question "what do you do with the knowledge that such tests might reveal?"). The pseudo-science which is being peddled right now just seems to pander to a passive biologism … (Sorry for the gloomy nature of this post - we've just been sent "To root, to toot, to parachute -what is a verb?" from England by my sister for our two-year old, which is clearly one of these National Curriculum primers for tiny tots - what a load of anti-intellectual rubbish the whole field of education seems to be turning into in the UK these days!)

Yes, I think that it's too late for the 'Russian Solution' now too. For me it's an example of the kind of solution that's possible if hysterical war-mongers like Bush and Blair can be induced to shut up and let the grown-ups handle things. This isn't the thread for a nuclear power debate, but one of the many unpleasant side-effects of nuclear energy is that it produces bomb-making materials … and no-one has yet discovered a way to neutralise these successfully. The only 'solution' that's even being worked on is to put the products of nuclear power stations down deep holes for thousands of years. (I was about to call them 'waste products', but, actually, when nuclear power stations were first developed in Britain, one of their prime purposes was to produce materials for Britain's nuclear bombs.) At present most of these products are stored in highly unstable surface tanks (often under water). The bottom line is that Iran would get access to the raw materials for bomb-making if she started a nuclear energy programme, even though these materials would need further refining, using processes that the Iranians currently can't manage (although they can learn). This, however, is the case with any country with nuclear power stations (did you know that 'peaceful, neutral' Sweden was a hair's breadth away from deciding to develop its own nuclear weapons in the early 1960s?). It's too late to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle. What we have to do now is devise mature ways of dealing with that situation.

Dr Dunn had an interesting point to make about testing for learning styles too: Let's say that you find out that your 'native' learning style is analytic and kinetic (in other words you like to understand things by looking first at the details and then working up to the big picture, and you like moving around as you learn). Well, the point of education is to get you to expand your abilities, not just rest on your laurels. So, the correct response to such a result in a learning styles test is to get the analytic learner to start learning globally, etc, so that she develops the learning styles which don't come naturally. This way of thinking is why I have more time for learning style theory than for multiple intelligence theory …

Högskolan i Kalmar here. We're still committed (we've also been following other fora).

One other small point … I've been teaching for nearly 30 years now, and the longer I do it, the more difficult it is for me to give the term 'intelligence' any meaning at all. I can see abilities, and recognise that some people have more of them than others in any specific situation (I'm useless both at sewing and at the high jump), but I just can't see why certain abilities (such as the ability to understand the Latin subjunctive) are rated more highly than others (such as the ability to make a perfect joint between two copper pipes) - at least in school. Out in society, it's rather different, which is why plumbers get paid more than teachers! So perhaps my greatest objection to the followers of Gardner (rather than the person himself) has to do with the whole question of intelligence. I'm quite prepared to believe that MI is better than IQ … but it wouldn't have to make much sense to make more sense than IQ! There's a lovely passage in 'Hogfather' by Terry Pratchett about Susan Sto-Helit, Death's granddaughter, who's trying to make it work as a governess: … And they'd been conscientious and kind and given her a good home, and even an education. It had been a good education too. But it had only been later on that she'd realised that it had been an education in, well, education. It meant that if ever anyone needed to calculate the volume of a cone, then they could confidently call on Susan Sto-Helit … Anyone at a loss to recall … the square root of 27.4 would not find her wanting. If you needed someone who could talk about household items and things to buy in the shops in five languages, then Susan was at the head of the queue. Education had been easy. Learning things had been harder. Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on. (pp. 39-40 - ISBN 0-552-14542-4) Perhaps the problem is that MI is all about education, rather than about learning.

I was at a conference in Örnsköldsvik in Sweden in 2000 which was all about learning styles. The keynote speaker was Dr Rita Dunn, who was the joint founder of the whole area of research (see http://www.learningstyles.net/2004/1_rd.html). What impressed me about her various contributions that weekend was the broad and deep research base which underpinned the conclusions her team had come to about learning styles. At one point in the conference she answered a question from the floor about the relationship between her team's theories and Gardner's theories about multiple intelligences. Her answer went something like this: "I've talked to Howard about this, and he says that his theories are just that - theories. It's up to others to devise the experiments which will prove or disprove them. What we're talking about, however, is the results of verifiable, peer-reviewed scientific experiments on thousands of subjects, which is a whole other ballgame." I haven't followed the scientific debate myself since 2000, but it might well be that the distinction between a theory and the verified results of careful scientific experimentation hasn't been made clearly enough … which leaves the field free to the old familiar argument that the kids are just thick - if they aren't achieving anything, it's their own fault (nothing to do with how we organise our schools, set up our lessons, develop our societies, etc, etc).

Can I just throw in a quick reality check? The Iranians say that they aren't trying to make a nuclear bomb, but rather trying to develop their own nuclear power. Now, they may well be lying, but it isn't very smart to state that openly if you want another nation to change its behaviour. But what if they're telling the truth? If that's the case, then the Russian approach seems much more productive to me. I.e. 'Ok, you need enriched uranium. Let's set up a plant on Russian territory but under joint control. That way you'll get all the enriched uranium you need more quickly, and with our expert help. You'll certainly learn how to do it yourselves, but you'll do it in a controlled way, with our involvement all the way down the line.' The problem is that the hysterical reaction from the West makes that kind of productive approach just that bit harder to achieve. Perhaps we need another thread (on a different sub-forum?) too, about the madness of relying on nuclear power to solve our energy crisis.

Andy (and everyone else), If you want to include Team Blogs, I've got three courses starting next month which will be using Team Blogs in slightly different ways. None of them have much on them now, but they will soon. Teaching English to Younger Children is a distance in-service training course for teachers teaching English at all levels from day nursery up to the end of junior school (as it used to be called). This team blog is designed to help participants share the ideas that come up during Study Group Meetings and can be found at: http://teyc06.blogspot.com/ Business Writing is an entirely on-line business English course, where the team blog is used for students to post 'warm-up' tasks, which are lighter versions or practice versions of more major send-in tasks. The purpose here is really to allow people to make common mistakes without losing too many marks. My job as course coordinator is firstly to make public comments on problems many students are likely to have (which takes place on the team blog), and secondly to make a private assessment of the blog contribution and give it mark (which takes place in a private e-mail to the student concerned). This team blog can be found at: http://bwvt06.blogspot.com/ Finally, we have a team blog going for the partnership programme between my Writing Course students in southern Sweden (who're learning how to write academic essays) and students on a Composition course at Central Missouri State University. We're still discussing precisely how this blog will be used, but the basic idea is to allow peer-to-peer contact between students researching similar writing topics. You'll find this blog at: http://concomp.blogspot.com/ These blogs will really take off around mid-February. There's already a one interesting side-effect, though. If you take a look at the profiles constructed by participants on the blog, you can see how often they've been viewed. There are some that have only been viewed a couple of times, but others which have already passed the hundred mark, despite the fact that the course hasn't even started yet … It looks like students are using their profiles to communicate 'off-course' information with each other, and I'm fairly sure I know what type! Cyber-flirting is one of the innocent pleasures of on-line education, isn't it!

A few years ago a friend of mine was trying to work out why there are so many useless and authoritarian managers in the public sector. His conclusion was that they were trying to emulate the private sector … but the only role model they had for a private sector manager was JR in Dallas! You can learn lots of things by modelling yourself on JR, but you won't learn how to run an oil company …

I spent yesterday afternoon helping one of my colleagues from another department who teaches Maths. She broke her leg on the ice at the beginning of December and is laid up with her ankle in a cast, but she's due to teach an intensive course next week in a place called Hultsfred, which is about 100 kms from Kalmar. She's got a wireless broadband Internet connection at home (a beautiful 17" G4 Powerbook with an Airport connection) and I downloaded the Marratech software for her, set up a Wacom pad (for writing mathematical formula on the interactive whiteboard) … and she's up and running. Next Monday she'll be working from her bed, connected up to 20 students in Hultsfred, who'll see her and her whiteboard projected onto a screen. She'll be able to talk to them and they'll be able to talk to her. She'll also be able to do one-on-one tutorial sessions with students from their homes to hers. Now there are several ways you can look at this … The downside could be that she can (has to?) work even though she's laid up. On the other hand, she's bored and champing at the bit to get back doing something useful. She's also the only person we've got in Kalmar who can do this kind of specialist maths course successfully, so if she didn't do it like this, the course would have to be cancelled. The flexibility of this course is mostly at her end too - the students will still be gathering at a Study Centre and working in a classroom, much as they would if she were fit enought to travel there. For her, though, she saves the 3-hour return trip (which she'd have to make just about every day next week if she hadn't broken her leg). It's true that she'd be paid for this, but she'd still have to lose those hours out of her life …

In my view, one of the reasons why some Swedes often don't seem to recognise the picture of their country portrayed by foreign observers is that Sweden is still a very divided society. It's been many, many years since there was a real breakthrough by one or other of the political blocs, with 51%/49% being a typical election result (Sweden uses proportional representation, so the votes cast pretty well determine the distribution of seats). The 49%-ers have nearly always been the political right … who tend to own newspapers, become economists, etc, and it's an article of faith for them that the policies of the 51%-ers can't be right. They're nearly always the people who write letters to foreign papers to point out the errors of their ways in saying anything good about Sweden at all. In 1992-1994, when the political right were having one of their rare periods of political office, I was a Team Leader on a World Bank project in Trinidad and Tobago. The Swedes had been hired to advise a young entrepreneur programme about how the 'Swedish model' of training for enterprise worked (I was counted as an honorary Swede …). At that same moment, the right-wing Swedish government was trying its hardest to abandon the Swedish model, partly on the grounds that 'no-one else organised their society like this'. I found it profoundly ironic that the World Bank was supporting the Swedish model, whilst the Swedish government was trying to abandon it! At the same time, good governance is a bit boring. When the economy works, people just assume that that happened by accident, rather than by a consistent application of political principles by the people in power. Having a high degree of equality is also irritating to people who see themselves as 'natural rulers' (who've been largely out of office since 1932). In a profoundly unequal society (like the UK or the US) part of the fun of being rich is to sweep past the bus queue of people who can't afford to run a car in your vehicle that costs the same as a house. Now in Sweden the rich people do have fancy cars … but even the poor people can afford to run cars too. There are still plenty of people who can't afford holidays abroad … but everyone gets their 6 weeks in the summer.

Ah, the good intentions of the 'pre-end of term' period. It was as busy as usual, and then we went to Madeira for a winter break … Still, here we are in January, and I'd like to take these descriptions a little further. Teaching English to Younger Children has just gained an extra twist - quite typical for flexible learning courses at this basic level of the development of the practice. My boss forgot to limit the geographical spread of applicants for the Spring Term course … so now I'm faced with delivering the course in a situation where not everyone is going to be in a 'home group'. It can be done … but the problem facing any flexible learning teacher in a situation where most education systems are set up for inflexibility is that not everything that can be done should be done. We've been trying to get some of our terms and parameters defined here in Kalmar in the last few months. 'Home Group' flexible courses are one which depend on the existence of viable study groups at specific locations ('viable' meaning 'with five or six regular participants'). 'Open Access' courses are ones where the exact design of the course and the mix of technologies used to deliver it are not decided upon until the applications come in. An implication of not specifying things in detail when the course is offered is that you are likely to have isolated students whose only contact with the rest of the group is via virtual media, such as blogs or Marratech. Finally there are 'Studio' courses, where a lecturer sits in a studio in Kalmar and lectures to individuals or groups sitting at a very large number of video conference studios spread out all over the place. Home Group courses are designed around student participation - a lot of the learning activities are set up so that you have to meet other people face-to-face and mull something over. Then there'll be face-to-face (f2f) meetings and video conferences where both reporting back and receiving new inputs take place. Studio courses are more like conventional lectures - there's neither the time nor the opportunity for much interaction with the lecturer. Open Access courses are a new phenomenon - I'm probably going to be the first teacher in Kalmar to run one this autumn - so we don't quite know how they're going to work yet! However, recent technical developments with desktop video conference (enabling us to link up desktop users with studio users) are very likely going to allow us to have the geographical flexibility of a Studio course together with the pedagogical flexibility of a Home Group course. Of course, it's easy to just say that - implementing it is another kettle of fish. My January intention is to keep you posted about how this first Open Access course develops. We're not starting entirely from scratch - the reason we have to start offering them explicitly is because students have created the genre themselves de facto. What's happened over the last few years is that students have quite simply ignored what we've said about where and when the courses are going to take place, and just applied anyway. I'm one of the teachers who's accepted this situation and created de facto solutions to the problems of course delivery. Now we're going to go the whole hog and make these de facto solutions into a feature of course design!

It was my grandad who formed my first impressions of Churchill. He'd been a union organiser and Labour Party agent in Sheffield, and always referred to him as "that bugger Churchill", who had a plane ready with its engines running in Hyde Park so that he could flee the country if the Germans had invaded (it turned out that there was an airstrip prepared at the Kensington Gardens end of Hyde Park, partly for the purpose of evacuating VIPs in an emergency). It was Tonypandy which really got Churchill into my grandad's bad books, together with the use of troops in Glasgow in 1919. My grandad was also, incidentally, peripherally involved in the mutiny in April 1918 (have you heard about that one?), when British soldiers mutinied in Folkestone to avoid being sent back into the German offensive which nearly won the war for them. He'd been lightly wounded and was on his way back to Britain to convalesce. The mutiny had already started as his troopship pulled in to Folkestone and the MPs just shoved all arriving soldiers straight on to whatever train was in the station at the time. He ended up in Sheffield … which is why I was eventually born there. He was also one of the participants in the great Kinder Scout trespass in the 1930s, which paved the way for ordinary people to have access to the countryside. He started his military career in 1900 when he lied about his age and managed to enlist in the Royal Enniskillen Fusiliers (he came from a large family and they were starving - getting into the army was one of the few ways of getting a full belly and clothes on your back). At the age of 12 he was shipped off to China (helped suppress the Boxer rebellion), then was sent to India, and found himself in Egypt at the beginning of World War One. His regiment fought in Gallipoli (another source of hatred for Churchill) and then in every major battle of the Great War (well, it was an Irish regiment, so, quite by chance, happened to be picked for all the dangerous assignments by the English generals).

The Swedish school system has become more complicated in the last 10 years, but Graham's last point is basically true - private, fee-paying education is an extreme rarity (the only such school I can think of is the one the royal family send their kids to). There are now schools which are called private, but they receive their funds from the local council (who run the school system here) on more or less the same per capita system as the state schools. They are inspected regularly by state inspectors and have to follow the same basic curriculum as the state schools. There is evidence that these schools are managing to become selective by using policies such as excluding handicapped children and immigrants, but it's happening by stealth. Guess which political bloc thought of the idea … (hint, not the social democrats). However, these schools haven't been in existence long enough to create much trouble … but it's starting now. In the same way that comprehensive education in the UK began, and became strongest, in the rural counties (because of the financial madness of trying to run three schools where there were only enough pupils for one), it just doesn't make any sense to have lots of unviably-small schools in most of the small towns in Sweden (you can probably guess that the system was thought up by people who live in Stockholm). In Kalmar there's an interesting situation developing, which mirrors developments all over the UK. The area of town the private schools want to set up in (and thus the type of pupil they want to attract) is the comfortable, middle-class area. So … it's the rather posher state school in this area which is most under threat from the private schools, and is under threat of closure, because it can't attract enough pupils to make it viable. In the meantime, the schools in the poorer areas of town (which are still not poor by any UK definition of 'poor') are going from strength to strength, because they're big enough to be able to use their resources efficiently and effectively. I remember comparing the range of subjects offered by my sisters' comprehensive school in Harrow with Dartford Technical High School for Boys where I was working in 1979. They had around 20 more subjects to choose from (OK, one of them was Pottery … but everyone who studied Maths also studied Statistics at Park High and there were lots of academic subjects which Dartford couldn't have the teachers to teach because the school was basically too small). It's the same phenomenon here. As for what you can do about the mess in the UK … well my solution was effectively to emigrate!

My main argument against selection is that it always results in a terrible waste of human potential - wherever you happen to draw the line. Harrow County School for Boys was a case in point. Before Harrow Council was obliged by central government to go comprehensive in 1970 Harrow County had a very high reputation (getting a couple of pupils into Oxbridge every year). Immediately after comprehensivisation its reputation slumped … firstly because (as numerous HMI reports had stated) the school had been concentrating its resources on about one-fifth of the pupils and grossly neglecting the other four-fifths (who had already been selected into the supposed top 20% by the eleven-plus exam), and secondly because comprehensivisation allowed all the parents in the borough to apply for a place for their kids at all the schools. The ones who thought that Harrow County had some sort of social cachet fought to get their kids in there … where they discovered that the infrastructure of the school was in appalling shape (apart from the sixth-form science lab … because it was easier to get pupils into Oxbridge if they studied science subjects), and the teachers generally lacked the ability to teach even the top end of the ability range. The school hadn't bought a book for the school library for years, for example. Abolishing selection (which they did in Sweden in the late 1960s) has some interesting effects. It's a bit like passing a law against smacking children: it doesn't in itself stop the practice, but it changes the social climate where such behaviour is seen to be acceptable … which in turn leads parents and schools to have to look for other alternatives to promote behaviour that we want children to exhibit and discourage the opposite type … which in turn seems to encourage creativity in finding solutions to the basic problem of inequality in society. This is by no means to claim that everything in the garden is rosy. Social segregation keeps rearing its ugly head - if you've got a position of privilege, you'll fight very hard to hold on to it. However, the notion that social segregation is somehow a natural order is strongly resisted here. Instead it's seen for what it is - the desire by a small group of people in society to perpetuate a system whereby they receive a disproportionate amount of that society's resources. As you can see, I don't see selection as having anything to do with 'ability' - if we knew any neutral, reliable ways of measuring ability, I'm sure we'd be using them … but I don't think that we do.

It's been interesting seeing the intellectual twists and turns of conservatives in Sweden over the Bush administration. As in most countries, the dominant parts of the media are either explicitly or implicitly conservative editorially (bear in mind that 'neo-con' in Europe is called 'neo-liberal', so the European label 'liberal' denotes someone on the right, not on the left). Swedish conservatives usually have pro-Americanism as their unchanging core value, no matter what kind of pro-Americanism it is. Thus, in a country which is profoundly distrustful of international military alliances, Swedish conservatives have a knee-jerk 'Sweden must join NATO' reaction to any international event which involves armies (there are plenty of Swedish conservatives who want Sweden to send troops to Iraq, for example). But the poor things have no idea what to think of Dubya: it's hard to thump the tub for an administration which is so clearly deficient, and which has so clearly blown chance after chance in Iraq. Fiscal responsibility is also a guiding principle for conservatives here (although, just like conservatives in other countries, they aren't so good at following this principle when they get into power). Whatever else you say about the Bush administration, 'fiscally responsible' isn't likely to be part of it …

And all the evidence suggested that the elections in the Soviet Union were free and fair too … it was just that the basic conditions in which the elections were held were totally biassed towards the Communist Party. They didn't need to go round assassinating candidates (as happens in Iraq), or publishing religious fatwas telling you to vote for the religious party of your tribal group, because the social controls were so much more subtle.

Once again, it depends why they were voting and who for. When I studied Politics in the 1970s at Warwick University one of the really interesting courses was a comparison of the political systems of the USA and the USSR. One of the things I didn't know was that the USSR had plenty of elections … and it wasn't usually the Communists that won! In fact, something like 70% of the candidates to regional bodies weren't members of the Communist Party (although, you've guessed it, they were vetted by the Communist Party). Do all those votes in the USSR amount to reasons why the Soviet system was good and that Soviet democracy and US democracy were the same? In other words, the existence of voting and the existence of democracy are not necessarily the same thing.

It all depends why they were voting … and what they were voting for. I'm sure that the Iranians are very grateful to Bush and Blair for firstly removing their arch-enemy (you know, the guy who attacked them with the full support of people like Donald Rumsfeld), and secondly for handing power over to Shia politicians who spent their formative years in Iran. Don't hold your breath expecting there to be any pay-off for the US or the UK, though. The Iranians work on the principle that 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' too … but we're their enemy again now.

Well, Tim, I suppose it does if you want to bury your head in the sand. What the occupation has managed to achieve is a situation where once-secular Iraq is under the control of more or less extreme Muslim fundamentalist groups … well, at least the two-thirds of the country which is populated by Sunnis and Shias. Both the Sunnis and Shias turned out to vote yesterday on the urging of their respective clerics … whilst the Kurds were voting for de facto independence (which our NATO ally, Turkey, will undoubtedly be extremely hostile to). What I think they were voting for was the further break-up of the country. All I saw yesterday was a further demonstration of the statement: the US had a war in Iraq and the Iranians won.