David Richardson

I think that there's a difference between how Presidents are remembered in the US and how they're remembered in other parts of the world. I've noticed, for example, that Reagan - and even Nixon - are remembered quite fondly in the US, but out here in the rest of the world, I think there are plenty of people who remember particularly Reagan as a right-wing ideologue who did immense damage to the US economy and the respect for international law in world (remember mining Nicaraguan harbours, whilst maintaining an embassy in Managua - imagine if the Nicaraguans had done the same in New York), rather than, ultimately, as the Gipper who managed to 'end the Cold War'. I think you'd need to be a fairly blinkered right-winger out here in the rest of the world to be able to discern any good effects of the Bush presidency …

Reading this reminded me of the time when Mr Black, the Deputy Head of Dartford Technical High School for Boys, collared me just before assembly to tell me that I, an English teacher, would be taking third-form Chemistry that morning in one of my very few free periods that week. "But I'm not a Chemistry teacher, Mr Black," I said. "You're not teaching subjects, David, you're teaching children," was his reply. I'm sure that this is a great way of teaching subjects … but what about the children? (This is roughly why we decided to stay in Sweden for our daughters' education, rather than returning to the UK.)

Interestingly enough, Ferguson can only call Pinter vain and his ideas drivel. He can't deny that the USA has actively supported many an act which would be called a war crime if another state committed it, and many a group who would be called terrorists if they were supported by someone else. In other words, I read Ferguson's article as the kind of ad hominem attack often condemned here in this Forum, and my conclusion is that he's making that kind of attack because he lacks any basis for arguing against the substantive points Pinter makes. The argument that 'even though it might look like a morally-bad action, if our guys did it, it must be OK' was rightly condemned when it came out of the mouths of apologists for the Soviet Union … so what's right with it when it's being applied to the USA?

Which arguments did you use with your tekkies to allow you to get through the firewall? They might work for Alex Savage too.

Alex Savage (who's also just joined this forum) and we are struggling with this problem too. He's had video conferencing equipment gathering dust at his school for years, without being able to connect to anyone not within the four walls of his school … He's meeting the county technicians (in Norfolk) just after the New Year, and I'll let you know what happens if it's relevant to your problem. What we're trying to provide Alex with is technicians who can talk to his technicians about how we've solved this problem in Sweden. Marratech UK are also helping out (since Marratech is one of the programmes we want to use to communicate with each other with).

The very term 'Personalised learning' illustrates both the attraction and the danger of the whole idea of flexible learning. The Swedish equivalent is 'putting the student in the centre' … which sounds very nice, until you realise that it could be interpreted as meaning "I've done the teaching, and made all the material available, so if you're still failing, it must be your fault" … which isn't so nice. The first Director-General of Sweden's Net University liked to ask the rhetorical question "who doesn't want to be flexible?", to which my answer is "every school and university in the world". Head teachers and university principals want to be able to show off their wonderful campus, filled with happy, well-dressed and clean students and pupils - who're all doing what the teaching staff have arranged for them. Flexible learning, on the other hand, often involves people who aren't immediately visible (serving prisoners are an important minority within my students at the moment, for example), who work in constellations which are often outside the teacher's immediate control … if the teacher has set up the course properly. However, there are good bits about flexible learning too … about which I'll come to in my next post. My own feeling is that there isn't a 'science of flexible learning' (yet?), so the best way to get ideas about how to enhance courses is to look at what different people have done and then use the bits that fit your situation best … it's what I've done anyway. There's another thread in this sub-forum where I hope people will do that … One of the developments I've found really interesting is how you can get campus students to work with non-campus students, without either group really being aware of the difference (I'll post something on the other thread about the latest developments in our Kalmar-Central Missouri State University partnership programme sometime this week).

Let me tell you about our in-service training course for teachers of English (as a Foreign Language) in Sweden. Teaching English to Younger Children (5 Swedish Credits, or quarter-speed) is a course designed for people teaching English to primary- and junior-age children (say up to age 11), who, perhaps, lack formal qualifications to do this. It's a university-level course, and the credits gained can be added to other credits within the Swedish system to gain higher qualifications. The modus operandi is to get practising teachers to work with each other to discuss the issues involved and to practise the techniques. The way the course is currently delivered is that we have three face-to-face meetings, four video conferences and six Study Group Meetings spread out over a term (say 24 weeks). The students build up a portfolio of reflections, observations and ideas which is assessed at the end of the course. Each study group meeting involves discussing something seen in the classroom in the period since the last course event. Participants are encouraged to observe each other's teaching, and reporting back takes place both to the other members of the study group (who're often all at the same school), and to everyone on the course at the video conferences.

I asked John to create a new forum about flexible learning to see if we could firstly start debating some of the issues involved, and secondly spread information about how flexible learning works. 'Flexible learning' is a very trendy phrase, especially in the mouths of educational administrators. For people financing education systems, the lure is to be able to reach out to new 'clients' without significantly increasing the outlay on education, since the idea is to use facilities and teachers more efficiently. In other words, if you can 'deliver' education in alternative ways to the incredibly costly 'bums-on-seats' approach, you can, perhaps, get more teaching done by existing teachers, and use fixed assets like buildings and computer systems for more hours of the day. What does it mean for teachers, students and pupils, though? One of the problems is that this whole area has been bedevilled with fairly sterile discussions about the very name of the activity. Are we talking about distance learning … or open learning … or open/distance learning … or distributed learning … or blended learning … or e-learning … or connected learning … or flexible learning, to mention just some of the terms which have been used? My own definition, which might as well be called flexible learning, is a way of creating learning environments in such a way that the learner can learn at a time and in a way which suits her best. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) often makes its appearance here … but it isn't an essential element. Distance also plays a part … although it might very well be the learners who are 'local' and the teachers who are all over the globe. What I hope will happen in this forum is that people will start by describing their own experiences of either running or participating in flexible learning … and that we can also discuss the hows, whys and wherefores of the whole phenomenon.

This is something Sweden does extensively and well. If you're a union rep here, you are sent on a series of courses to make sure that you know the ins and outs of your job. I have a friend who's a Health and Safety at Work Officer for her union and she must have been on a dozen courses (mostly residential). It's left her knowing much more about the law than her counterparts on the employers' side of the table … which was useful when she was the prime mover for bringing in the inspectorate, who managed to improve working relationships between employers and employees no end. I do a fair amount of in-service training for teachers which could be categorised as 'life-long learning'. Distance learning obviously plays a major role in this, but it's distance learning's flexibility, rather than the distance that's the major factor. One of the aspects of the courses which regularly scores very high on participant evaluations is that teachers get to talk to each other about teaching in a neutral setting (i.e. on a course which is organised by an outside body). If anyone's interested in hearing more details, just let me know.

A technical question, Dan: how are you dealing with the storage of the sound files involved? The way I'm doing podcasts at the moment involves the creation of about 1 GB of sound files per full-time course per term (that's at a rate of about 2 hours of podcasts per week). If the students were podcasting too, this figure would be many times greater. Our IT department has managed to get the management to create an 'internal market' for IT services, and their going rate for 1 GB of storage is about 10,000 Swedish kronor (say, 1,000 euros) per year … which is clearly absurd, since you could buy a very large capacity server of your own for that amount of money. I suspect that their policy is going to implode under the pressure of developments …

I thought I'd start this topic to see if anyone else has experienced any serendipitous effects of participating in the Forum. Through contributing to the Forum, I was invited to Gothenburg in September to participate in an E-HELP meeting. Whilst I was there I met Terry Hayden, and Terry put me in touch with Alex Savage, a teacher in the UK who's been looking for international contacts for the county he works in (Norfolk). Alex and I had our first successful studio video conference (Polycom) on Friday, and now we're actively looking to start new links, such as including his sixth-formers in the Partnership Programme we have with Central Missouri State University, which focusses on composition. I'll also be visiting my daughter's head teacher soon to see if we can put learners of French, German and Spanish in her school and Alex's in direct contact with each other. There are also potential spin-offs in other subject areas too. This wouldn't have happened if I hadn't started reading the Forum … … has anything like this happened to other people too?

I was 9 and living in Sheffield, England. My memory of the time around the assassination was taking the bus into Sheffield to go to a music lesson and seeing all the flags at half-mast. The assassination had a profound effect on us all, really. I remember the difference between the respect the USA was held in in the post-war period up to the assassination and the way that respect drained away almost completely after Vietnam, Nixon and Gerald Ford. I was studying Politics at Warwick University all through the end of the Nixon Administration. We were doing US and Soviet politics … and it was interesting seeing the similarities, as well as the differences between the two systems. I remember when we covered the impeachment procedure the lecturer getting all excited about such an archaic procedure potentially being dusted off and used again. Little did he know that it would be no time at all until it was used for real … I wonder how much of US post-war history has been shaped by the distortions and perversions of the 'American Way' caused by Nixon and his mentors and cronies.

Here's something we're going to be doing this spring. Bryan Carter, Kathy McCormack and I are all running 'composition courses' in the spring, me in Sweden and the other two in Missouri. We're going to be trying to get over the ideas that composition is a process, and that there are specific skills you need to develop to be good at it. My students are already experienced users of podcasts (they notice when they're late, for example), and Bryan's and Kathy's students are young technophiles, so we don't anticipate any 'consumer resistance'. Bryan and I use Macs, and we've got a whole new set of tools to use with the new system 10.4 (sometimes called 'Tiger'), including multi-party video conferencing on iChatAV, with extremely high audio and video quality. We've also got some third-party software called 'Conference Recorder' which allows you to make either audio or video/audio recordings of iChat AV sessions. Conference Recorder has a quick conversion feature to turn the audio recordings into .mp3 files. So, the plan is to hold a series of transatlantic 'conversations' about composition (à la Open University embarrassing broadcasts by men with sideburns wearing bell bottoms and women wearing sensible clothes!) which will be published as podcasts from about February onwards. Let me know if you want to listen in and I'll post the address when it's ready.

Thanks for those kind words, Terry! We've just started testing a new feature in Marratech - dialling out to a conventional video conference studio. It works really well, and it's going open up all sorts of possibilities of including individuals who can't get to a studio in conventional studio meetings. So, if anyone has a video conference studio they use which works on the H.323 standard, I ought to be able to enter your IP address and call you up on it.

This is very true … but we can't all create forums and allow for others to access them freely. Creating a team blog on Blogspot is very much like creating a forum, except that 1) we don't have to pay anything to anyone; 2) we can all access it (i.e. we don't have to ask IT departments to create new users who may well not be people studying at our institution). Creating a need to communicate is an essential part of a language course, so we can't really do anything without it, including blogging.

We've been using blogs for three or four terms now to put students at Kalmar and Central Missouri State University in contact with each other so that they can work together on composition courses. We've created a series of team blogs (i.e. with named individuals being invited to be able to post on the blogs), where students have different types of tasks, depending on what kind of course it is. Over the 2 years we've been doing it, there have been some very interesting revelations all round, particularly when rather straight-laced Americans come into contact with very serious Swedes who have a completely different set of social mores. Lots of the Missourans have found it difficult to reconcile the Swedes' religious beliefs (we're in the Swedish bible belt down here) with a different set of social values. One of my inputs was to post a scanned-in wedding photo from our local paper here in Sweden … where the pages and bridesmaids were, of course, the couple's own children. The idea of 'parading illegitimacy' in the local paper caused quite a lot of discussion in Missouri and got them thinking about what's really essential to a society. What they call a 'socialized health service' caused a lot of discussion too. There aren't any active blogs to look at right now, since we're both near the end of our respective terms, but we'll be starting again in February with some new groups.

Isaac Asimov once made a similar point in the preface to one of his collections of science-fiction short stories, when he was commenting on the fact that most people don't know the names of the scientists who have been responsible for the incredible increase in the quality of life since ancient times. His point about slavery was that it was the invention of the horse-collar which ended slavery in the Roman world … but that we need to be on our guard, since the moment the economics flips the other way, something like serfdom often gets reintroduced. One of my heroes is Dr John Snow, the man who removed the handle of the Broad Street Pump (you can read more about this at http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/broadstreetpump.html, and more about the man himself at http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow.html). Cholera was also seen as a 'moral' issue, before it was investigated scientifically by people like Dr Snow. In general, I think that Dr Snow had the right idea - look at the facts first before rushing to judgement … and eliminate as many of the other explanations first before you start attributing things to 'evil' human nature. You just have to look at Scandinavia and Holland to see that the most effective way we seem to have devised to reduce abortions so far is to have freely-available, confidential and low-cost advice about contraceptives, coupled with a more equal distribution of wealth in society and the provision of financial help to people who need it.

English as a Foreign Language teachers use techniques like these all the time (as, probably, do MFL and ESL teachers, but I'm not quite sure what they're up to these days). Grammar Games, by Mario Rinvolucri (CUP, ISBN 0-521-27773-6) will give you a taster, if you're interested.

. . . and I'd add the the most important product of a capitalist company is probably its customers! In other words, capitalism is also about creating 'needs' where they don't exist, or about changing 'needs' so that they fit in better with what capitalist companies want to make. Two examples spring to mind: 1) fabric softener … which didn't exist as a product before advertising companies decided that we needed it and started to sell it to us 2) Cornflakes … who'd have thought a hundred years ago that people in northern Europe would see roasted, rolled maize as an essential ingredient of their breakfasts.

This is also true of the design of on-line courses. There's a Japanese proverb I use all the time when I'm advising teachers about what technology to use on a course: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In other words, the features of the technology will tend to dictate the design, unless the designers make themselves independent of the technologies first (before reintroducing them - but on the designers' terms, not the technology's).

Tim, I don't agree with Ed's ad hominem attacks, but I do think he's got a point. Seen from my perspective up here in northern Europe, I'd say that the United States is a very difficult laboratory to use if you want to find things out about human behaviour, on account of the gross inequalities that exist there. In other words, the distorting mirror on human behaviour that inequality and injustice presents makes it extremely difficult to sort out what is cause and what is effect. On the other hand, as a matter of practical politics, encouraging the cohesion of families must be a good idea. The question is whether the institution of marriage is the right vehicle for it. A Swedish academic recently came up with a way to cut the Gordian knot on the issue of whether gay people should be permitted to marry - just abolish marriage for everyone, then there wouldn't be an issue! He wasn't advocated abolishing the civil protections marriage is sometimes associated with in some countries, by the way. When the Myrdals in Sweden were helping to set up the current welfare state here, they saw the provision of high-quality day nurseries as an essential element in promoting the cohesion of families. In other words, if you make day-care provision cheap and of very high quality, you enable all sorts of social benefits, including the possibility of women being able to earn the money which will take them out of poverty. Before our youngest daughter was born we took part in a parenting course at the local maternity centre. There were 7 couples taking part, of whom only two were married (both immigrants - if you count me as an immigrant). All the women, apart from my wife, were having their first child, but only one of the men was. Many of them had children of their own who were not that far in age from the woman they were with now. The point is that this was taking place in the affluent surroundings of Sweden. There's absolutely no evidence that the lack of marriages causes social problems here, or that the rather involved and complicated relationships people get into does either. If you factored extreme poverty into the equation, together with an unbalanced view of the place of marriage in society, I'm sure that you'd get the problems too … as night follows day.

I'm sure that this statistic accurately represents the situation in the USA. However, what it doesn't do is to establish a causal link (i.e. that they're criminals because they come from broken homes). The next thing to do is to see if there are any other factors which could explain this incidence (and, without having researched it, I wouldn't be surprised if socio-economic factors do just that). There's plenty of historical evidence that the incidence of crime goes down as neighbourhoods become richer. London, for example, was a much more dangerous place in the good old Victorian days than it is now. I remember once, too, reading the school diaries which all state schools were obliged to maintain until the early 1920s from the (then) rural town of Dartford, just outside London. In the 1890s it was quite common for parents to come round to the school and thump the teacher or throw a brick through the window, if the teacher had said anything that little Johnny took exception to. When I was teaching in Dartford in the late 1970s, this would never have happened (though I don't know if it does now). Again, without having the figures in front of me, I wouldn't be surprised if there were far more broken homes now than then. Homosexual pedophiles were fairly common in those days too.

Hm … the Heritage Foundation isn't exactly a neutral, scientific body, though, is it. Scandinavian societies traditionally have a very low incidence of marriage, and a very high incidence of single-parent families … and generally very stable family life, with low incidences of social problems (including teenage pregnancies and abortions). Having the wealth of the society more evenly divided certainly seems to have something to do with this, but long-term cultural factors probably have a role to play too. Scandinavia was always sparsely-populated, so there often were insufficient priests to go round, in the days when these societies were still religious. However, children were still needed to be born (to work on the farms!), so it was quite common for the priest to come round every couple of years and 'regularise' all the relationships. One consequence of this was that couples who failed to produce children could often just separate amicably, without having to get into drawn-out fights about property and inheritance (which are what marriage is really all about, isn't it - the property and the inheritance, that is, not the fights!). When the Scandinavian societies became secular and threw off the dead hand of the church, stigmatisation of unmarried mothers quickly disappeared. Astrid Lindgren, for example, who wrote Pippi Longstocking, had an illegitimate son when she was 18 in the 1920s, but carried on with her life anyway. It took until the late 1950s, though before the attribution of 'illegitimate' to a child really lost its meaning. An exercise I often use to introduce visiting Americans to Sweden is to show them a picture from the local paper of a family, who are all dressed up, and are usually photographed in some area of natural beauty. Americans rarely guess that these are wedding pictures … and that the bridesmaids and pages are the couple's own children. If people get married at all (and far fewer than 50% of them bother), they usually wait until the children are 9 or 10. It's also becoming more and more common for the husband to take the wife's family name, rather than the other way around … and it's also common for each person to just keep the name they were born with, despite being married. Homosexual couples are now allowed to adopt children too, although this still isn't that common. So … if the proposition is that it's the one-parent families, or divorced families that are somehow causing the social problems, the example of Scandinavia seems to disprove that. It would seem more likely on this evidence that social problems stem from the economic structures of society than from the types of relationships people have.

I've just had a very pleasurable experience writing a book chapter about blogging, audio-blogging, podcasting and Internet radio, together with Bryan Carter, who works for Central Missouri State University (CMSU). We used Marratech desktop video conferencing frequently to show each other the additions we'd made to the text, and to discuss the direction the chapter was going in. It's amazing how much easier it is to write together if you can also talk together as you're doing it. I'm also just setting up a couple of classroom-to-classroom co-operative projects. One of them involves classes of secondary school pupils studying French in various countries. My aim is to set up Marratech links between them so that they can exchange ideas with each other directly. The other involves getting ESL (English as a Second Language) students and teachers from CMSU directly involved with teacher trainees and other students here in Kalmar. We're in the process of setting up a 'Marratech room', so that people on each side of the Atlantic can participate in each other's lectures, lessons and group work. If you're interested hearing more, or in sharing your experiences in the same area, please don't hesitate to post!

How about two political stories: The first one is about a French MP who represented the Communists in the National Assembly. He had a lavish lifestyle, owning a Mercedes and regularly eating out in fashionable restaurants. At a party meeting he was criticised for this departure from his political principles, and replied with "Nothing is too good for a representative of the working class". The second one is also from France. When Bernard Tapie was both an advisor to the Mitterand (Socialist) government and the owner of the Marseille football team, he asked the local National Front (neo-nazi party, very strong in Marseille) if he could come and address their congress which was being held in the city. They were a little surprised, since they knew of him as a bitter enemy of their party, but they reasoned that since there were going to be more than a thousand of them and only one of him, they ought to be able to win the argument! Tapie stood in front of a packed hall and began like this: "I think your party's policy is too soft on all these immigrants. You just want to deport them, but I say they should be packed into an old freighter, towed out to sea, and then the ship should be sunk by the guns of the French Navy." There was a shocked silence, and then the whole hall erupted in cheering and clapping. Tapie waited for it to die down. Then he said, "I always knew you were a bunch of disgusting fascists, and now you've proved it to me," turned on his heel and walked out.