David Richardson

John wrote this in response to my posting about the presentation in Gothenburg: … so I thought I'd start a new topic to try to set out some ideas. When I'm designing a distance course, the first step is to work out what it's for. I often express it in this question: what problem is this distance course intended to solve? (In other words, you apply the same reasoning to distance courses as you do to any other kind of course!). In the case of E-HELP, it would seem that the problem is that you want to disseminate the lessons learned on the project to the greatest possible number of teachers in Europe … but you only have funds to collect a relatively small number of them in one geographical location. It's the common problem of trying to bring expertise to bear - you end up paying a lot of money and spending a lot of time transporting people's bodies … when it's actually their ideas you need to transport. The reason you have to transport their bodies is that we human beings haven't really yet worked out how to work with each other effectively if we don't meet each other face-to-face (f2f). So … if we start out by accepting that a distance course for the E-HELP project isn't going to be a full-blown substitute for an f2f meeting, we can perhaps start to speculate what it *could* be useful for. I'm not a History teacher, and I'm not particularly well-versed in E-HELP, so please bear with my speculations about this, and adapt the bits which you find useful. You could use a distance course to prepare participants for a f2f meeting. It might involve briefing them about the process you'll all have been through in Years 1 and 2, perhaps giving them some case studies to look at in detail (e.g. what we did wrong … and what we did right). The f2f meeting could then begin at the step 2 of evaluating and developing what you've learned on the project, rather than the step 1 of 'merely' disseminating information about it. Another use of a distance course could be as a kind of 'Lancaster method' after an f2f meeting, when participants in the f2f meeting fan out across Europe spreading the word, as it were, to groups of teachers who couldn't participate. It would be fairly natural for these distance courses to be specific to a particular country and/or language. In Sweden, for example, Dalibor and Anders would run a distance course in Swedish, aiming to recruit, say, 20 History teachers from around the country. There are almost certainly yet more variants which you History teachers can think of for yourselves … Now we've dealt with the 'why' of an E-HELP distance course, the next set of questions is all about 'how' … but that's the subject of my next post.

I'll start a new topic about this within this sub-forum.

There are now three podcasts available on my English 1-10p course (beware of the Course Launch podcast, though - it's got about 7 minutes of Swedish in the middle of it, when I interviewed a representative of the Student Union about what they could do for distance students). I've now organised it like this. If you go to the Course Home Page: http://www.humsam.hik.se/distans/existstud/a1/a1homepage.htm one of the links is Podcasts. Click on that, and you're able to click on each podcast in turn to listen to it on screen … or you can copy the direct link for each live podcast and paste it in to the Open Stream dialogue box in Windows Media Player or iTunes … or you can download the instructions for subscribing to the podcast in iTunes. You can see what the full extent of the podcasts on this course is likely to be by looking at all the links (both active and not-yet-active). Among some of them which will come later will be interviews with various native speakers who have interesting dialects (like Oklahoma and Orkney!). I screwed up the podcast xml document the first time I added something. I was in a hurry and I'd clearly put some kind of extra line in somewhere. Our IT department actually managed to fix it (thanks to me visiting them personally and intimidating them by speaking English to them!). I've just managed to update the document again by copying the last <item> </item> bit and changing the wording a little. I had a problem knowing how long the podcast was in bits, but I just wrote it down from the screen as Dreamweaver uploaded the actual .mp3 file. The 'production line' goes like this: I sit in front of my Mac and just talk to it (I do this a lot anyway!) with Sound Studio open and recording (could do it in GarageBand too, but I haven't had time to work out how it works yet). I save that file as .aiff (native Mac format for sound files) and then convert it to .mp3 in iTunes. I move the .mp3 file over to the podcasts folder on the course site in Dreamweaver, and copy it over to the live site, using the Mac Terminal programme (the IT department also fixed me what I think they call a tunnel to the 'distans' folder on the live site, which I can use both from home and from work). I then copy the last <item> to </item> bit of the xml document and change the relevant bits (like the date, which is important for getting the files in the right order in iTunes) and update the live site with the new .xml document. Finally, I go into the podcasts page on the Course web site and make the latest link live. I'm doing this again this morning with three more, short, podcasts, which are basically mini-lectures about phonetics, grammar and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I expect it to take me an hour to broadcast three 15-minute lectures. The podcasts are getting rave reviews from students - even though they're really primitive (just me talking). It gives them a feel of belonging …

One really useful aspect of a system like Marratech is that you can do the groundwork for a meeting in advance, so that you can concentrate on the main business when you're there together. Imagine if you'd managed to do the business of the breakfast meeting in Gothenburg over Marratech before you'd even arrived. I had a mail from my new student in Hong Kong this afternoon. She got the study pack this morning (posted on Friday in Sweden …), and we're going to do a Marratech meeting on Wednesday, so that I can bring her up to the same speed as the people who were in Tingsryd on Saturday (just before I turned up in Gothenburg, that is). If I didn't have desktop video conference, that wouldn't be possible. BTW one aspect of my talk I forgot to write about was the way we can bring experts like Chris Metress in Birmingham, Alabama into direct contact with students or pupils, using desktop video conference.

Marratech In Gothenburg I showed two OHPs of desktop video conferences on our Marratech server. Marratech is a desktop video conference programme which you can read more about on: http://www.marratech.com There are now several versions of the programme, including a freeware version (which is, of course, much more limited than the licensed version). We have a licence for 5 virtual rooms, which can be used to bring people together from wherever they happen to be. The threshold for the remote user is very low: all you need is the free Client software (downloadable from the Marratech site), a cheap webcam (if you want to be seen), and a cheap headset and mike (if you want to avoid deafening everyone else with feedback. If you want to try Marratech out, go to this site: http://www.meetings.sunet.se/participants/testmarratech.html (It's run by the Swedish University Network - SUNET.) If E-HELP members want to use one of our Marratech rooms for on-line meetings, get in touch and I'll set it up for you. I'd be happy to host an on-line meeting to show you different ways in which we use Marratech.

I'm making a posting about my presentation in Gothenburg yesterday (if I don't do it now, it might take quite a while before I have time again). Firstly, let me say how much I enjoyed meeting the E-HELP members and associates who made it to Gothenburg. I could only participate in a small part of the discussions, but they were interesting. I wish I could have been there longer. I was speaking without notes, so it may be that I miss one or two points … but you've got the film, so you can always fill out this account from that. My presentation allowed for on-going dialogue with the rest of you, so there were, inevitably, one or two points I'd intended to make, but didn't. I've included these here, marked with asterisks, so that you can see the difference between what I said and what I intended to say! ICT in Distance Education in Sweden I began by trying to give you a picture of the Sweden I work in. Sweden's a very large country by European terms - with a land area about the size of western Europe, but a population of just about 9 million. Most people live in small towns and villages, which are quite a way from each other (I mentioned that I drove 380 kms to get to the meeting, and passed about 2 manned petrol stations on the way - and one place where I could stop off and get some coffee on the way home. Most of the time I was driving down two-lane roads through thick forest.). Given the fact that the government's policy for many years has been to make higher education available to everyone, and that it's really important for the small towns to try to reduce the 'brain drain' to the cities, then using ICT in education is essential. The problem is that not many people have known how to do it! *The Swedish government has shovelled money at anyone who wanted to try to get ICT-based distance education off the ground, with very varying degrees of success. The process has followed a familiar pattern: you start by giving money to technicians and computer experts … but they don't know much about teaching; so they define the problem as the moving of bits of information into the heads of the learners ('giving them knowledge'); so they start off by writing their own learning management system; then they discover that it's really expensive and incredibly difficult; so they buy a commercial platform programme; then they spend all their funds trying to organise the content; but they find that they don't have any content; so they try to get some teachers to hand over their notes; which they put on the platform; and often they manage to run courses; which have an incredibly high drop-out rate; and finally they evaluate the whole process; and quite often just give up … several million euros later.* *However, there have also been plenty of success stories, where the common factor has been that teachers have been empowered by getting their hands on fairly simple tools and being given their heads.* The success stories have generally looked at the acronym ICT and realised that the technicians' (see above) mistake was to see it like this: IcT. In other words, it's all about information and technology. However, for a teacher it's all about: iCt - communication. Once you concentrate on create communication between learners, teachers and materials, you can come up with all sorts of creative solutions. However, you can almost never shrink-wrap them, and all of them depend on on-going inputs from fairly autonomous, independent-minded teachers, whose loyalty is first to the students' learning … and only later to the technology. This doesn't mean that these teachers don't need any kind of support - it's just that the support works best when it fits itself to the teachers, rather than tries to tell teachers how to teach. I mentioned the way the Swedish Agency for Flexible Learning (http://www.cfl.se/?sid=60) organises its IT support: they have an IT department which is responsible for keeping the networks running, and 'web warriors' who are technicians and programmers who are made available to teams of teachers who're putting on-line courses together. They have an intranet where courses are constructed and tested. When the courses are judged by the web warriors and teachers to be ready, the IT department gets to look at them, and then they're placed on the public server. *There also needs to be pedagogical development which is informed by knowledge about ICT. I mentioned the goat-cheese farmers in Jämtland in the north of Sweden who could latch into a network of similar farmers to be able to download a list of ingredients in German for their German customers. In 1997 I was running a course for study centres in Jämtland who were joined together by this Zonline system (http://www.zonline.se - except it's all in Swedish). Zonline is basically a First Class based system and I was trying to tell them of the virtues of the web. "It's a very simple way of making high-quality pictures available to the students," I said. "But why do you need pictures in teaching materials?" they said. "Aren't Word documents enough?" BTW Zonline now has a variant of its system for downloading to 3G phones - the next technological and pedagogical challenge.* My conclusion from all this was that course designers and teachers were suffering from the syndrome described in this Japanese saying: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In other words, we were letting the technical features of the systems we were using define our pedagogical goals, rather than concentrating on using that technology to achieve our goals. I concluded that I needed a common pedagogical denominator in order to make sense of the bewildering variety of technologies I had available, and the one we developed is something I call 'the cone of input'. As luck would have it, I found a description I wrote a while ago, so here it is: The cone of input … is a conceptual tool the team I work with developed a few years ago for teachers to try to make sense of the range of tools and possibilities they have available. The reason we did this in the first place was that we were drowning in information and technological toys, and no-one seemed to be able to give us the big picture from a pedagogical point of view. We started with a quote from "In Search of the Virtual Class" (Tiffin, J and Rajasingham, L, RKP, 1996): “For the moment, let us accept that the amount of bandwidth is a measure of the amount of information that can be transmitted at a given time by a channel … “The irony of the current situation is that the classroom is a broadband environment and can be used to transmit as much information as the senses can absorb. Yet we mainly use it for learning with words which require little bandwidth.” This gave us the idea that 'bandwidth' would be the unifying concept. If you start with maximum bandwidth, you've got a physical environment like a classroom or a lecture hall. Studio video conference uses a bit less bandwidth; the web even less; e-mail even less; and the cable that goes to the printer on which you print out your handouts least of all. Put these 'rings' of bandwidth together and you've got a cone - which is what the teacher or tutor has to put her inputs into. The aim, however, is to create a rich learning environment in which the learner creates a 'cylinder of learning' with bandwidth as wide as that available face-to-face. There's a financial aspect to things too - the more bandwidth you use, the more it costs (someone, anyway). There's no such thing as a 'free' lecture hall, or a 'free' journey to the face-to-face site for the students. Then there's a pedagogical side to things. Perhaps with many subjects people need the rich input of face-to-face before they can fill their own 'cylinder of learning'. Other subject areas thrive on the minimalist input of low-bandwidth environments like e-mail, since the distractions are fewer. In any event, the course designers are faced with a balancing act all the time in order to use the optimal amount of bandwidth at all points throughout the course. We've found this process so complex and stimulating that it feels a lot more like art than science … which fits in very well with the empirical way I work as a teacher! *Here's an example of the cone of input in practice. I have a colleague who teaches history in adult education in a area of natural beauty called Hälsingland. One lovely spring evening he was in the bus on the way home from a course meeting and took a blurred digital photo of a local beauty spot out of the window. When he got home, he posted this on his site with the question "Is this the soul of Hälsingland?" Within 24 hours everyone of the course had responded (with poems, stories and observations), and then they started responding to the responses, etc. In other words, a small piece of input in the cone of input created a very large amount of student learning.* You're free to take a look at the site I use (the link's both at the bottom of this posting and at the top of the page [Distance Courses]) … but bear in mind that the on-line courses I work with are all centred on communication, and you can't create a link to the network of contacts students have with each other and with me. In fact, you could say that the desire to 'see' any course I work on is a category mistake (a term from philosophy coined by Gilbert Ryle: a foreign visitor comes to Oxford and is shown round the colleges. "But where is the famous 'Oxford spirit'?" he asks. That's a category mistake: you can point to a college, but you can't point to the Oxford spirit.).

Here are a few words about the place I work: Högskolan i Kalmar in Sweden. Kalmar is one of the 35 state-run universities and 'högskolor' in Sweden (we don't really have any private ones). A 'högskola' is a university-level institution which can award first degrees in all subjects, but Ph.Ds only in a limited number of them (Natural Sciences in our case) - a bit like an old UK polytechnic. There are 8 departments here, and I work in the one called 'Humanities and Social Sciences'. We don't have a Teacher Training Department as such. The general teaching theory is handled by the Health Sciences and Psychology Department, whilst subject-specific courses are under the aegis of the department concerned. Citizenship (which I'm choosing to identify with the Swedish subject 'samhällskunskap' - literally 'knowledge of society') falls under our remit. The system of teacher training was radically reformed in Sweden a couple of years ago. Nowadays about one quarter of all the credits are awarded for 'school-based training' - i.e. formally by the teaching practice mentors out in the schools. This has meant that we have had to liaise a lot more closely with individual teachers in the schools in our region, and we've now built up a close-knit network of contacts in local schools in the area of south-east Sweden. Thus the associates from my department you might end up working closely with have extensive experience of working in and together with schools, and it'd be relatively easy to include voices from classroom teachers here too.

With respect, Dalibor, you don't know very much about me as a person … However, I'm hoping to be in Gothenburg this coming Sunday, so you can see for yourself whether I've got horns and a tail. However, let's stick to things we can identify (and perhaps agree on). It's a good thing that Hussein isn't in power in Iraq any more - he was an evil dictator. 'The end justifies the means' is a very dangerous doctrine - mostly because we can rarely be quite sure what the 'end' is, whilst in the meantime we've accepted some extremely unpleasant acts. The West has had a terrible track record since World War Two with this doctrine. I'm thinking of all the dictators in Latin America (remember that it was Roosevelt who said of Somoza in Nicaragua "he may be a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch") and also of the CIA-backed overthrow of the democratically-elected leader of Iran, Mossadeq, for the heinous crime of wanting to take control of Iranian oil. That overthrow sent a powerful signal to the entire region (including one Saddam Hussein) that the West had no interest in democracy - only in power. Two wrongs don't make a right - just because Hussein is evil, it doesn't follow that every action of the invaders can be justified by that. The invasion itself was illegal … and if it hadn't been, then USA would have had a chance of winning … provided that the US government was prepared to work with the international community instead of against it. Trying to railroad the rest of us into a failing enterprise to create an ex post facto justification for an illegal act was never going to work. One of the aspects of my current job is to teach people about the culture and society of the US, by the way. It's important not to confuse the good and great aspects of that society with the interests of the cynical band of crooks who're currently running it.

If you could specify in what way you think my answer is not an answer, perhaps I could make my ideas a little clearer. I wasn't aware that there was a 'kind' like me - I'd always seen myself as a bit of an individualist. And I'm not sure how a moral stance (e.g. "Don't sell poison gas to dictators and encourage them to use it") is politicised. Gassing people is wrong, no matter who does it, and for what purpose, at least according to the Geneva conventions.

I think that the explanation is fairly clear: we in the West (principally France and Germany) sold Saddam Hussein the technology to make poison gas (together with a lot of nuclear technology). The Americans (headed by Donald Rumsfeld) supplied Saddam Hussein with high-grade satellite intelligence about the disposition of Iranian forces. Hussein then gassed the Iranians (in contravention of a list of international agreements, many of which were written after the Second World War specifically to deal with how you sup with the Devil). Saddam Hussein then used the same technology against the Kurds in 1988 … but he was still our guy then, so neither Mrs Thatcher nor Ronald Reagan basically uttered a peep about it. The gassing of innocent citizens in Hallubja didn't become a war crime until after Hussein had taken over the Kuwaiti oil fields and was ready to roll down the coast to take over the Saudi Arabian ones - at least in the eyes of the same politicians who're trying to make a high moral case nowadays. I take a simpler view: it was wrong-headed and immoral of the West to encourage Hussein to start the war against Iran in the first place. It was also wrong of us to supply him with weapons of mass destruction, and the means to make more. It was wrong of us to help him use them. I can't immediately think of a similar set of immoralities during World War Two, although the second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki perhaps qualifies. The big difference there, though, was that the Nagasaki bomb was still untested technology, so you could argue that they needed to try again to really make the point. Poison gas technology has been known about since World War One. We in the West certainly handed millions of East Europeans over to Soviet oppression … but we were at least contrite about it afterwards, and never tried to pretend that it had never happened (as George Bush the elder and a host of western politicians have tried to do with their dealings with Hussein). It might also have been the case that the Soviet Union might have tried poison gas out against the Nazis … but we'll never know what might have been, since they felt themselves restrained (perhaps because they were winning anyway, or perhaps because they knew the Germans would retaliate in kind, something the poor, abandoned Kurds couldn't do). To sum up, my point is that the West's treatment of Hussein before Kuwait was immoral. The differences between the alliance with the Soviet Union and our treatment of Hussein are legion, but at least we're not trying to pretend that the wartime alliance never happened. If we were trying to achieve a 'greater good' by defeating Iran, then our policy has now finally run into the sand. As many American commentators are now saying, "We had a war against Iraq and the Iranians won." BTW, by this I mean that the country which has benefitted most from the US invasion of Iraq is Iran: they trained and equipped both the political and military organisations which now control the major part of Iraq's territory and oil, and those organisations seem to show allegiance to their trainers.

I can think of one very good reason for the ambivalence of the West towards what's happening in Iraq - most of the Western leaders (in particular Conservatives and Republicans) supported Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. I was in Saudi Arabia when the first Gulf War broke out, and I remember the consternation among a number of right-wing politicians (such as George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Margaret Thatcher) that 'their' guy had had the temerity to go one step further than they'd sanctioned. I also remember the feeding frenzy among Western arms suppliers (principally from the US, the UK and France) between the ending of the Iran-Iraq War and the beginning of the first Gulf War. Do we remember the scorn and hatred shown by Mrs Thatcher and the right-wing press in Britain towards that poor Observer reporter (British citizen, by the way) who was executed by Saddam Hussein for daring to reveal some of the nastier practices of Hussein's Iraq? Note that the indictment against Hussein doesn't currently include starting the Iran-Iraq War. His defence would be too embarrassing for current members of the Bush Administration (Rummy and Cheney, for example). So … by all means let us rejoice at the fall of a tyrant, but let's also remember who was responsible for keeping him in power for all those years (and it couldn't have been the Left, since they weren't generally in power at the time).

I talked the Project through with my boss this spring, and I think it's fairly certain that the University of Kalmar will be able to take part (and we're a teacher training institution). Whether I'm the main contact person is another issue. In our department we have a number of teacher trainers of History and Citizenship teachers who've been lurking on this forum already and are very interested in contributing in some way.

A few thoughts from Sweden … Here's something from the website of the Swedish Rescue Services Agency (one of those 'welfare state' agencies in Europe): "The Swedish Rescue Services Agency’s (SRSA) planned departure of aid to the disaster area New Orleans didn’t go ahead on Sunday. However, planning continues so that aid can be despatched at a later stage. The reason the SRSA flight didn’t depart on Sunday was that the US authorities do not at present have the facilities to receive foreign humanitarian aid. The SRSA’s planned despatch includes, for example, water purification plants and communications equipment. A team of five would accompany the equipment. If aid is eventually despatched it will be by Hercules aircraft of the Swedish Armed Forces taking off from Landvetter Airport, which is just outside Gothenburg. The SRSA will, over the next few days, maintain continuous contact with the relevant Swedish and US authorities. It was on Thursday evening that the SRSA responded to the general request from the US for overseas help. The Swedish Government decided on Friday to task the SRSA with the planning for and execution of despatching humanitarian aid to the US if they request it." The initial response from Sweden came on the day of the disaster when the Embassy in Washington offered Swedish aid. It took until Thursday lunchtime, Swedish time (i.e. Thursday morning, Washington time) for the response to be answered by the US. What the SRSA can and will provide includes pre-fabricated houses and an emergency mobile telephone system (for existing cellphones). There have been a couple of good articles by Paul Krugman in the New York Times about the consequences of 'starving the beast' (i.e. minimising public services in favour of private ones). Basically, if you think that the private sector can create a civilised, fully-functioning modern state, then think again. The United States had a good public sector for enough years in the 20th century to provide a basic infrastructure, and it's taken 30 years or so of neglect for that infrastructure to start showing the strain. In the first years after the freeze on investment and the privatisation of all the 'profitable' bits, the machine will keep running on its own momentum. Then things start to break down (take a look at the UK water, electricity, gas, sewerage, public transport, telephone, etc, etc systems or the Swedish electricity supply system after deregulation). The tragedy for just about all of the Sun Belt states is that their basic infrastructure was never that good in the first place and that there just weren't any people in positions of authority who pushed to provide states like Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama with a 'first-world' society. Perhaps one of the 'good outcomes' of this terrible natural disaster, though, will be to help wean European voters off the idea that you can cut public services without there being any real costs. --------- Two of the countries which have offered aid to the USA, by the way, are Cuba and Venezuela. Cuba has offered the services of 1100 doctors and Venezuela offered to send 2000 troops to assist in maintaining law and order. Now I'm sure that Chavez was just wanting to make a point (since the Robertson 'take out Chavez' suggestion the week before), but Cuba's provided highly-qualified professionals enough times to enough places for me to think that Castro's motives included genuine humanitarianism (please note the word 'included'!).

If Kalmar's involved, then Swedish would be another of the languages. The various people involved here in Kalmar are mainly Swedish speakers and the part of the activity involved in recording what goes on now would be best done first in Swedish. Since the terminology involved isn't standard across the EU, I think that it's important that key concepts are expressed firstly in people's native languages. Thereafter it might very well be necessary to add explanations to straight translations. If you take the English word 'equality', for example, it can be translated by two different Swedish words, 'jämlighet' and 'jämställdhet'. The former is a description of a state of affairs, whilst the latter is an active process. I suspect that one of the toughest tasks during Year One will be for us all to agree exactly what it is that we're talking about when we say 'Citizenship'.

I'd like to endorse John's proposals too. I like the idea of us 'taking a stand' in Year Two (in terms of proposing a model … or perhaps just identifying 'best practice'). I suspect that Year One is going to reveal some quite important conceptual differences between what the various countries see as 'Citizenship' (I forecast, for example, that there'll be 'prescriptive-descriptive' differences). It would be very good if we could address these differences head-on in Year Two, even if we have to work through a certain amount of disagreement. I realise too that an EU Project Group has no actual power over national curricula … but it surely must be within our remit to contrast what is happening with what we suggest ought to be happening. In terms of associate members, we have a number of experienced teacher trainers of 'Citizenship' teachers who are very enthusiastic about the whole idea. If we get funding to pursue this matter here in Kalmar, my suggestion internally will be that they provide the ideas and I take responsibility for getting them recorded and included in the Project web site.

Is it possible to set up a Marratech connection during the Worthing meeting? We could certainly host it on one of our servers; the people in Worthing would ideally need a room mike + projector and a broadband connection; and the other participants who aren't in Worthing just need to have a cheap webcam and headset, and download the free Client software. If we set up a regular set of meetings throughout the weekend, at least you'd get some idea of who we all are.

I often find that younger students know a lot about how to press the buttons on a machine … but they don't know much about why they should be doing it. I had a classic illustration of this once when we bought in a one-day intensive course in Pagemaker. We got round to kerning and the instructor could teach us exactly how to do it. They we asked "what is kerning and what is it good for?" His answer was "I don't know, it's something printers find important." Later we hired a graphic designer who used Pagemaker to help us remodel our teaching materials. What an education that was! I remember her deciding for us to set the tab in a particular place to 4 mm and the font size to 11pt. I changed it to 5 mm and 12pt, and she looked at the result and said "that's 5mm and 12pt - now try it my way". And it was true - her way looked so much better. She knew all about kerning and showed us how to use it to enhance our printed materials … but she was generally quite bored with the mechanics of doing it. As for the definitions of e-learning, aren't they a bit too much like debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? E-learning will be what people who use e-learning decide what it's going to be. The 'cone of input' idea I've expounded about at length elsewhere in this forum was developed to try to make the decisions about technology into pedagogical ones rather than technical ones … and it looks like DfES hasn't got there yet.

I'm back at work now after the lovely long Swedish summer holidays and we've just set up a podcasting server which I'm going to use on a course this autumn. If you want to hear my first amateurish effort at podcasting for a group of new students in the south of Sweden, the stream URL is: http://www.humsam.hik.se/distans/podcasts/a1podcasts.xml (If you select 'Open Stream' on iPodder, iTunes or Window Media Player and put in that URL, it should start playing a 15 minute programme for my students.)

Sorry I'm late, everyone - I've been incredibly busy these last two weeks. Here are my data: Participant: David Richardson Institution: University of Kalmar Country: Sweden Town: Kalmar

I've just started a blog on one of our internal sites about how I'm putting together an on-line course which has to be ready in January. At the moment I'm still going through the 'history', but I'll probably be up to the present-day by the end of the week. If you're interested in reading it, you'll find it at: http://ganymede.hbv.hik.se/blog/businesswriting.php

OK, I've blocked off 2/9 - 4/9 in my diary.

One more formal question: what languages are we going to use? At the moment, we're using English as the working language by default. However, I think we ought to consider a language policy - even if it's a really simple "English +" one (i.e. I don't think we need to spend too much time on the debate, since we all know what the disadvantages of trying to express yourself in a foreign language are). My feeling is that if we don't put this question on the table right from the start, individual team members could start feeling that they were at a disadvantage later on. I suspect as well, though, that Citizenship is an area where specific terms might need to be defined in the language of their origin, with explanations in another language. Just think of the Swedish term 'folkhem' (people's home) which describes the vision the social democrats had of an inclusive welfare state - the very term sounds like East European communism! You never know, we might be able to forge a practical working policy which falls in between the extremes of English determining the terms of the discourse on the one hand, and the paralysis of everything having to be translated into umpteen languages on the other.

Firstly, let me try to explain what an English teacher is doing on this site! I think that the aspect of my work which John was most interested in was the IT-based distance education aspect. Or, to put it in more normal language: how do you get both teachers and pupils from around Europe to collaborate with each other actively? I'm going to ask a colleague of mine, Nicholas Ammert, if he would like to contribute to this part of the Forum (if that's OK with the rest of you). Nicholas is an experienced teacher of 'Samhällskunskap' (knowledge about society) and is currently a teacher trainer in the field. Sweden (and the other Nordic countries) have had something like 'citizenship' as a compulsory part of the school curriculum for many years now, and it might be interesting to hear what's worked and what hasn't. I think John's ideas are really interesting. I also see a Citizenship course as being a sort of 'Owner's Manual' for how society works. One very common project on similar courses in Sweden is to get the pupils to find out how you campaign for very concrete improvements in your local area (such as getting a reduction in the speed limit right outside a school, or getting the council to take a more environmentally responsible attitude to waste). Encouraging schools in different countries to compare and contrast their experiences could be both a learning experience for each set of pupils, and a way of getting them to see their societies in a more European perspective. One feature of citizen's rights which is particularly strong in Sweden, for example, is 'offentlighetsprincipen' (the right of public information). Basically, most official documents have to be given a reference number, and any citizen can demand to see them, at very short notice. So, if you want to see the Prime Minister's official credit card receipts (i.e. his official credit card, not his private one), to see what he was spending public money on last month, you just have to ask. This is something that's really wound up certain EU officials - it's difficult to keep low-level secrets when Swedes are involved … and it would be fascinating to see if there was anything comparable in other EU countries. However, as I've said, the subject matter of this project doesn't really fall within my area of expertise, so I might well be barking up the wrong tree …

My name is David Richardson and I teach English at a university in southern Sweden (Kalmar). I've been involved with distance education since the early 1980s and with IT-based distance education since the early 1990s. Besides Sweden, I've worked in the UK (as a secondary teacher of English and French), in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Angola. I was also Team Leader and pedagogical advisor on a World Bank project about education for entrepreneurship in Trinidad and Tobago for a couple of years in the early 1990s. Apart from that, I have two lovely daughters and we have a little cottage just outside Kalmar, where I pretend I know something about carpentry and cutting trees down - I don't fool anyone, though! I'm really looking forward to spending the summer doing practical things, though, instead of the very technology-driven stuff that I seem to spend most of my time doing.

However, when I think about what are usually classified as war crimes, I think firstly about fairly large-scale 'industrialised' actions. If you think about what seems to be happening in Darfur, for example, there seems to be collusion between the central government and the 'irregulars' who're committing their crimes on a systematic basis. Or take the US policy of 'extraordinary rendition' (i.e. shipping people they pick up to countries where they will be tortured). (I'm using this as a current example - even though you could argue that at least some of the people involved are irregular fighters and thus, perhaps, by some legalistic definition not involved in a war). An isolated incident like this could be attributed to an individual who could be punished for his crimes ... but the CIA have a special fleet of planes for the purpose, which indicates planning.