David Richardson

I clearly haven't explained my 'position' clearly enough, if you think that I've been criticising other people. To get back to science and religion, for me a fundamental science principle is that there isn't any certainty - everything has to be open to question, and we just have to accept that any answers we get are only going to be temporarily 'true' (until the next time our horizons are widened). Thus Newton and those who came after him were convinced that they'd discovered absolute truths about motion and gravity, so the conflict between 'believing in science' and believing in religion was stilled for a couple of hundred years. Then came Einstein and opened it all up again, by demonstrating that Newton's 'absolute' laws had only local application (on a galactic level) and the whole conflict opened up again. In my world view, comparing science and religion is like comparing apples with oranges. You have to believe in a religion (you don't seem to be able to 'prove' it) - but science is a set of principles governing a way of reasoning about the world. For me, science isn't something you 'believe in' - rather it's a set of principles which thus far have been uniquely successful in telling us how the world we live in works. The day they stop being successful is the day they get abandoned in favour of a better set of principles. Hasn't happened yet, though.

The key word you used was 'seemingly'! In fact, you can have an incredibly stable belief system if you rely on reason rather than religion. One thing that reason and rationality show me is that there's almost nothing that can be 'proved'. What amounts to proof is most often an extremely low degree of falsifiability … but that's actually a good thing. Reductio ad absurdum in formal logic is one of the few absolute proofs that I've ever come across, but all that gives you is the knowledge that *one* of your premises is false. It doesn't tell you which one … What you can rely on, though, is that the *process* of reasoning will carry you through, so that you're prepared for change, when new evidence comes your way.

I'd say it was the other way around. If you think, like I do, that when you die, you stop, then you've got a great incentive to enjoy life to the full. For someone like me, a suicide bomber, or any other type of religious martyr is a tragic figure, since they've traded being for nothingness … in the belief that there was some kind of reward awaiting them. In the same way, whether what I believe can be rationally proved or not is beside the point. My point is that reason is a process, not a result, so I don't have to be able to prove everything 'scientifically' in order to enjoy life!

Nearly all of them, I would say - the weather, to give just one example. (I've got a badge at home, BTW, which says "Religion is man's attempt to communicate with the weather"). When I start looking closely at 'purpose' it becomes very difficult to make it make sense at all, outside of fairly banal statements about the way machines are designed to work, and apart from very human ideas of specific people's intentions. In other words, I think you can talk about the purpose of the keys on this keyboard being to produce symbols on the screen, and my purpose in talking about slavery this afternoon at a video conference. However, to talk about the earthquake under the sea in South-East Asia (the one that produced the recent tsunami) having a purpose just makes no sense to me - it isn't human, and it isn't a human-produced artifact. By the way, as an atheist, I have no problem holding and justifying my values - even if they might rest on questionable grounds! The people I've met in my life who are most immoral by my standards have all been highly religious - or, in the words of the song, "Everybody talking about heaven ain't going there …"

Sounds like teleology to me … and, for my money, it was Voltaire who disposed of that a good many years ago. I think that the great thing about relying on reason rather than religion is that reason is a web of beliefs, where it is the process of reasoning which provides the strength of the web, rather than any particular result of the process. For me this means that there isn't a beginning to the process of reasoning and there isn't an end either … which is more or less the way I see the universe and its 'history' so far.

Mötet ägde rum igår och var väldigt intressant. Det deltog ett 10-tal personer, mest från högskolevärlden, och Katarina Jander som ledde diskussionen hade mycket att säga som var nyttigt. I stort sätt kan man säga att man inte har hittat något sätt att identifiera, klassificera och utbyta digitala lärarresurser än - åtminstone på en nationell plan. Det finns gott om informella nätverk, men problemet är att de inte är tillgängliga för de som inte vet om dem. Ägande- och upphovsrätt är dem två stötestenar än så länge, men det finns även en viss motvilja på högskolor, mm att samverka med andra (vilken överraskning!). Det blir ett Marratech möte till i april, denna gången om internationella kontakter. Kontakta Per Westman för detaljer (per.westman@netuniversity.se). Jag ska föreslå till honom att han även annonsera i detta forum.

There's a site in Sweden which promotes "Majority English". There's an interesting newsletter which comes out once a month with information about new developments on it. You can find out more from http://www.bentarz.se

On the other hand, to strike a slightly cynical note, it's probably just as well that the Christian Church has such a stranglehold over the discussion of religion in UK schools. Let's face it, compulsory Christianity every day since 1944 has produced one of the least religious societies in the world. Having to see hypocrisy in action every morning has clearly had a marked effect on generations of British schoolchildren.

This is a very deep question, which I understand not to have been researched systematically, despite the amount of teaching in English that's going on. One of the aspects of foreign language use which is often glossed over is the emotional aspect. When you express a concept in your native language, you've also 'invested' a certain amount of emotion in it. Let's take the idea of 'citizenship', for example. In British English, the idea has all sorts of connotations connected with Blair's immigration policy. A French term might be 'citoyen', which, I understand, has certain historical connotations. The Swedish 'medborgare' isn't entirely neutral, either (Medborgarskolan is the study circle organisation started by the Swedish Conservative Party) - 'folk' is a possible alternative, except that that word's been appropriated by the left … Using a foreign language, thus, isn't the same as using your native language. I often use the image of someone who lacks one of the senses of taste discussing the taste of food. Imagine if you couldn't taste salt, and were tucking into a salted fish dish. You'd still be eating the same dish, but the experience of the person who could taste the salt would be almost incomprehensible to you … and it would be a mistake to assume that their experience was the same as yours, which is what you can do as a matter of course with people who speak your own language. This isn't to say that you can never express yourself in a foreign language - this is plainly not the case. However, both you and your interlocutors need to realise that it isn't the same thing as expressing yourself in your native language.

Let me try to give you some background to the communicative approach to language teaching and learning (CLT). What came before CLT was what was broadly described as 'grammar-translation', where 'knowledge' about language was defined in terms of knowledge of 'facts' about language. I've put these terms in inverted commas because they are what the controversy was all about. Let's start with the 'facts' … A typical 'fact' was what my teacher of Swedish once told me: "The future is the tense we use when we talk about the future. In Swedish it's 'jag ska' - in English it's 'I shall'." The only problem is that in Germanic languages, there isn't a 'future tense' - what we have is a myriad of ways of talking about events which happen in the future (e.g. "I'm about to leave - can we do this tomorrow?"), a lot of which use modals. Language learning was a very rationalistic procedure: you learned the 'facts' and the 'rules' governing the facts, and then using and understanding the language was simply a matter of applying facts and rules, rather like you do at the lower levels of reasoning in natural sciences or mathematics. Thus my very enthusiastic and capable grammar-translation French teacher would start each lesson by having us all stand behind our chairs and fire 'fact-rule' questions at us ("David, verb boire, 3rd person singular, Present Tense, he" "Il boît", "Good, you can sit down"). Problem was, this produced lots of people who could conjugate Latin verbs, but who couldn't read a poem by Juvenal to save their lives. In CLT, 'knowledge' and 'facts' are seen very differently. How can you tell that someone 'knows' Swedish? Well, they can read it, write it, understand it and speak it - what other criteria can you use? Whether they can analyse the language is entirely secondary. Thus, I lived here for years not knowing that the verb 'skjutsa' (give some a lift) wasn't spelled 'shussa', since that was the way it was pronounced in the part of Sweden I learned Swedish in, and it's almost never written down, so you don't need to know how it's spelled. The key word in CLT is 'performance' - someone 'knows' a language if they can perform in it … and there are, of course, lots of different degrees of performance. Some of us are Olympic class skiers, and others can just make it down the hill without breaking any bones. However, the answer to the question "who can ski down the hill?" is "both of us". On the other hand, we're always aspiring to being able to perform better. We don't talk a lot about 'facts' of language in CLT, since most of the ones you can positively identify are rather banal and off the point (I am, you are, he is - big deal! Try talking to someone from Somerset or Trinidad!). A foreigner saying "I are here" wouldn't be misunderstood - and, who knows, English might have evolved into that form in 50 years' time. -------- I'm no historian, and I wouldn't really know where to begin to apply CLT thinking to history. It might be interesting to discuss what 'performance' in history might be - and I know that there's a lively debate about 'facts': "Nelson defeated the Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar in 1805", for example. What a clever chap he was - and with so many ships against him! Good thing there was a socio-economic-cultural background going on to provide him with ships, sailors, etc. And, in the end, how does someone 'know' history?

Nätuniversitet organiserar ett möte om 'learning objects' (digitala resurser som kan flyttas och delas med andra), där forskarna från Lund presenterar sina slutsatser från ett par års arbete. Det har gått två seminarie redan (man kan läsa en rapport från mötet i Lund via Högskolan i Kalmars flexwebb: http://www.hik.se/flexibelt/ -> Konferensrapporter ->Utbyte av digitala lärarresurser 2005-02-15), men Nätuniversitet inbjuder till ett interaktivt Marratech möte nu på tisdag (15/3), kl. 10.00. Per Westman vid Nätuniversitet (Per.Westman@netuniversity.se) tar emot anmälningar, och ger den praktiska informationen om hur man kan delta virtuellt. Marratech klienten laddar man ner gratis från http://www.marratech.com

Let me start with a few ideas about why pronunciation is so important, and why it needs to be taught systematically (using whatever method you like that works). 1. We take in far more language through our ears than through our eyes (compare the words-per-minute count of a tape, compared with the speed that most people read printed text). We also produce much more through our mouths, than via our fingers on pens or keys. Thus, one trick we use to help students to realise when they've made grammatical errors in their essays is to get them to read them aloud - even if they do this in the bathroom! They always hear the mistakes - but they very seldom see them, because the printed word, courtesy of their computer, has an authority all of its own. If it looks so neat, it can't be wrong! 2. If you don't teach pronunciation systematically, learners will just pick it up as they go along. The problem with this method (which otherwise has a lot going for it) is fossilisation. I.e. learners learn collections of sounds, but they have no idea how the language those sounds represent hangs together. "I gonna" is a case in point. On one level, it sounds as though the foreigner is in command of really idiomatic English … but wait until someone asks a check question: "You gonna come along? Well, are you?" There are lots of problems with fossilised language (which many young Swedes suffer from), but they boil down to the fact that the learner isn't very good at manipulating the language cognitively - only affectively. This means that it's very difficult for them to learn from their mistakes (because they don't know that they might be making them) … which means in turn that their language development stays on a plateau. You can get some hilariously embarrassing consequences as well (hilarious for the listeners, that is, not for the poor perp!). I remember once listening to an American academic trying to persuade a committee to follow his suggestions. The only problem was that he'd learned 'street-Swedish', which just didn't work in the context he was trying to operate in. Imagine sitting in a committee when someone's saying "this is a xxxxing excellent suggestion and if we all just pull our fingers out of our arses we could screw a xxxx-load of money out of those bastards in London". Life would be much more fun … but in the real world, especially when some of the people round the table were 'those bastards', you just end up being marginalised. 3. However, pronunciation is an automatic process, not a cognitive one, so, ultimately, a cognitive understanding of how a particular language is pronounced isn't going to guarantee your automatic performance … which is a shame, because schools and teachers are usually completely at home in the cognitive, but completely at sea with automatic and affective processes. Of which … more another day.

I think that this topic of teaching and learning pronunciation is so important that it deserves its own thread. I've started this topic in the EFL Forum: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=3443

I'm starting this topic as a spin-off to the discussion in Multimedia books in Education in the E-HELP folder: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=3283 I think it'd be better to continue this particular discussion here, rather than there. I posted this comment in that forum: "Language teaching in Sweden is generally quite a long way behind the times. The paradigm in schools is still straight grammar-translation (it's like going back to before L.G. Alexander in EFL teaching!), though audio-lingual methods swept in with language labs in the 1960s (because the accompanying materials were mostly produced in the USA) and promptly swept out again, leaving an awful smell behind them, since a lot of money had been invested for very meagre results (does this sound like ICT?). "One consequence has been that the official experts on language learning here tend to have a huge blind spot when it comes to the teaching and learning of how to pronounce languages. In turn, this means that they tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to anything connected with pronunciation practice, assuming it to be crude behaviourist audio-lingualism." … and the question for me is: when we know that speaking and listening are much more common than writing and reading, why do language teachers - especially in schools - spend so little time on teaching and practising pronunciation skills? I'll start giving my answers in later posts, but what do you think?

Just a note to language teachers outside Sweden who might be a bit puzzled by Dalibor's last point. Language teaching in Sweden is generally quite a long way behind the times. The paradigm in schools is still straight grammar-translation (it's like going back to before L.G. Alexander in EFL teaching!), though audio-lingual methods swept in with language labs in the 1960s (because the accompanying materials were mostly produced in the USA) and promptly swept out again, leaving an awful smell behind them, since a lot of money had been invested for very meagre results (does this sound like ICT?). One consequence has been that the official experts on language learning here tend to have a huge blind spot when it comes to the teaching and learning of how to pronounce languages. In turn, this means that they tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to anything connected with pronunciation practice, assuming it to be crude behaviourist audio-lingualism. You might wonder how come Swedes speak reasonably good English anyway. Well, to quote one of the leading lights in language didactics in Sweden (Eie Ericsson, former Gothenburg University) "Swedish pupils learn English despite school, not because of it." I shouldn't complain, really, since it's largely the ineffectiveness of school-based teaching which provides people like me with jobs (since, sooner or later, quite a lot of people need to learn to speak English properly!).

This is a complex area. I have a colleague here who's writing his Ph.D. thesis on exactly what happens when a Swedish lecturer lectures about maths or physics in English to Swedish-speaking students. He's at the stage of collecting observational data at the moment, but it seems that hardly anyone has done any hard field research in this area. His first set of data seems to suggest that students who understand the concepts anyway will learn, no matter how good or bad they and the lecturer are at the language being used. But then there's all the others … I'll keep you all posted as his research develops.

Let me elaborate a bit on my previous post. What takes the time is to get a larger group of teachers, or maybe even a whole school to embrace a different way of working. The great advantage of ICT is that an individual or a small group can achieve a lot with fairly simple technology … and as soon as other teachers and school managers start seeing results, it becomes easier to gain acceptance for the next stage. The blog we incorporated into one of our courses recently is a good case in point (I've described it elsewhere on this forum). It was free to set up, and only really required a personal relationship between two teachers at different places. The official management of each place is still fairly ignorant about it (which is a good thing, since it enables us to get something up and running before they start interfering and telling us how it should be done). Now it's found its way into an official report on the teaching of English at university level in Sweden … which makes blogging (and related phenomena) something for our university to be proud of … which makes it more likely that such grass-roots initiatives will get the support they need. Same thing happened last year with our use of desk-top video conferencing. It started out as a tool a few English teachers wanted to use on one course, and its use has become a mainstream practice for just about all the departments of our university.

I've seen the apprentice - 'expert' model work really well within the group of English teachers I work with. The fact that there are people you drink coffee with everyday, who don't see ICT as threatening, makes it easier to take the first step into a new world of teaching involving computers. But 'ting tar tid', as they say in Swedish (things take time). Youv'e got to see the process of development from scratch in terms of years (about 3), rather than months or weeks.

One extremely simple thing you can do with Word documents (e.g. a worksheet that has a series of web links on it that you want the pupils to follow) is to make the links live. You do this on the English version of Word by selecting the text and choosing the Hyperlink … command on the Insert menu. You can choose either to make your link look like a web address (e.g. http://www.humsam.hik.se/distans/existstud/toolbox.htm) or to look like an ordinary piece of text (e.g. The Toolbox) which takes you to the web address when you click on it. Then you mail the document to the pupils, and when they open it, it is, in effect, a worksheet with live hyperlinks in it. If you click on the Toolbox link above, you'll come to a page where I'm beginning to gather together the various bits and pieces which appear in separate distance courses, which language teachers might find interesting. If you click on the Language Learning Theory link, you'll come to a downloadable Word document called ICT in Language Teaching, which is actually the lesson plan for a presentation I did a couple of weeks ago. I made the web links live on it, so you can see what I mean. It was useful using it in the lab, since it meant that I didn't have to do anything elaborate when I was setting my lesson up. I just had to access the Toolbox, click on the Word document link, and then that document was my 'navigation tool'.

The biggest problem I have with Microsoft is its conservatism. The paradigm which dominates the products that get into schools is paper, so teachers are still encouraged to see on-line materials as being bits of paper, rather than materials which use a completely different medium altogether. One exercise I give to colleagues who're new to on-line work is to ask them what if they can work out why the letter 'a' you print out on a laser printer is different from the 'a' that you print out on a typewriter. The idea that you're working virtually (where the computer 'a' is really a string of 1s and 0s) is, for me, an essential first step if you're going to understand what you're doing and where you're going. There's a potent argument which says that you should introduce teachers to ICT in tiny doses, so that they don't choke. E.g. 'Word' is what's out there, so we'll construct a system whereby teachers can upload their Word documents on to a server … and that's your on-line course. In Swedish that's called 'bok på burk' (literally a book in a tin can). My counter-argument is that on-line courses involve a lot of hard thinking about your general approach and attitude towards pupils, subject matter and the whole learning process. If you don't do it, you might just as well stick with paper. If you do, though, then the final step of working with proper computer programmes and systems is actually dead easy. This argument applies just as well to Open Office as to the Office package from Microsoft (though I know that Linux is a lot more than an alternative Windows). However, the advantage of breaking out of the Microsoft box is that you can start thinking outside the box too.

The latest from Guardian OnLine Internet degrees a disgraceful waste, say MPs Rebecca Smithers, education editor Thursday March 3, 2005 The Guardian A government initiative to offer British university degree courses over the internet is condemned by MPs today as a "disgraceful waste" of public money after it recruited just 900 students at a cost of £50m. An investigation by the Commons education select committee found that studying at the UK e-University, which folded last year six months after the launch of its first courses, cost an average of £44,000 per student - more expensive than going to Oxford or Cambridge. The committee condemned as "wholly unacceptable and morally indefensible", the decision to award its chief executive, John Beaumont, a bonus of £44,914 on top of his £180,000 annual salary, despite his failure to attract private-sector backers for the venture. The e-University was launched in 2000 by the then education secretary David Blunkett. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), which oversaw the project for the Department of Education, said it was intended to be "the flagship provision of UK higher education excellence". Mr Blunkett predicted e-learning would be "big business". But the committee found that those responsible for the project were caught up in the "general atmosphere of enthusiasm surrounding the dotcom boom" and assumed that students and profits would flood in. Initial business plans forecast rapid growth to 110,000 students within six years and 250,000 in a decade, with projected profits of more than £110m. There was little market research to determine the true demand for the e-University's services, the report reveals. Just £4.2m was spent on worldwide sales and marketing of courses, compared with £14m on developing the virtual environment through which students would study. This was developed by Sun Microsystems. It absorbed more than a quarter of the e-University's expenditure, but was used by just 200 students, with the rest preferring to work through the existing online sites of individual universities. The e-University "blindly" pursued a policy of offering entirely internet-based learning, despite evidence that students preferred to supplement online study with traditional lectures and seminars, the committee found. Although the project was required by the conditions of its grant to seek 50% of its funding from private-sector partners, it signed up only one small investor other than Sun, securing just 0.5% of the private funding needed. With no significant private investors and no direct accountability to a government minister, the e-University had "too much freedom to spend public money as it wished", the report said. HEFCE closed the venture in February last year, when it became clear how few students had signed up. Barry Sheerman, chairman of the committee, said: "UK e-University was a terrible waste of public money. The senior executives failed to interest any private investors and showed an extraordinary overconfidence in their ability to attract students to the scheme. Any private company which rewards underperformance of this scale would normally face severe criticism... The UK e-University should have been held fully accountable for its spending as soon as private companies decided not to invest."

I was discussing ICT in education with my boss the other day, and she told me that the current orthodoxy centrally at our university was that acceptance of ICT is a generational question: as soon as the 'young people' come up through the system, the barriers will disappear. I begged to differ! One problem is that younger people know exactly which buttons to press, but have no idea why you should press this one rather than that one. I remember a course on Pagemaker we bought from a dot.com firm a couple of years ago when the instructor got on to kerning. He showed us exactly how to do it … but when we asked him what kerning was good for, he was completely stumped. "I'm a computer teacher, not a graphic designer". My point is that graphic designers (like the one we got to do our next course on Pagemaker) need to get a lot of experience of what good design looks like, in addition to the specific skills of knowing which button to press. This information overload which we're facing right now needs to be dealt with in a very traditional way, in my opinion. The task of a teacher has always been to help students and pupils to make their own judgements about the information they're faced with, and to be able to discriminate between well-founded and badly-founded judgements. The fact that the information is now coming at us in digital form, and often in the form of sounds and pictures, doesn't really change this fundamental task we've got as teachers.

I feel that the inability of governments and quasi-government bodies to be leaders in the field of ICT in education also has something to do with the nature of multi-media books. We're now living in a 'niche-based' world, where learning environments can be created very cheaply and easily, using fairly low-level technology. This means that individual teachers have an enormous amount of control over their learning environments, if they are able to - or choose to - exercise it. Ultimately the choice is between creating your own environments or using an environment which doesn't really fit what you're trying to do. At the same time, creating multi-media books is a lot more expensive than creating conventional ones, so publishers need a high likelihood of making a killing in order to venture into the field at all. In addition to this, the copyright situation is extremely fuzzy. It's akin to educational videos: who's the ultimate copyright-holder, the director of the project, the programmers, the graphic artists, the teacher/s who thought of the original concept, the script writers, the actors? It also takes a long time to produce multi-media books, compared with the time it takes to put an on-line lesson or course together, so the chances are that it'll be slightly out-of-date before it even reaches the pupil or student. -------- If this is the case, have I painted a very black future for multi-media in education? Well … I think not. It's the current paradigm of the production process that's flawed, in my opinion. When we've got enough on-line courses and materials, then publishers will be able to see which of them lend themselves to further exploitation. However, if they're going to avoid suffocating the creative processes on which they're going to depend in order to keep the stream of potentially viable projects flowing, they're going to have to encourage the thousand flowers to bloom, which means supporting the free exchange of learning ideas between autonomous professionals.

A course I'm working with this spring has just started using a blog to link up a group of students at Central Missouri State University (CMSU) in Warrensburg, Missouri, with my group of students in southern Sweden, studying at the University of Kalmar. I know that blogs aren't exactly new, but I thought that forum readers would be interested in hearing about what we're doing - and how. This blog is the latest in a series of collaborative ideas that I've been implementing together with Dr Bryan Carter from CMSU. Bryan's been over to Sweden a few times and we've chatted and Marratech-ed quite a few times over the last year or so. Bryan's students are studying a course called 'Class, Race and Gender in the USA' and mine have a module called 'US Culture and Society', so we thought this would be a good opportunity for both groups to get in touch with primary sources of information directly. Setting the blog up was easy. We started by setting up a planning blog for everyone even vaguely involved in the exchange, so that we could thrash out the details (we've been using http://www.blogger.com as our host). Then we set up a team blog, called TransAtlantic Conversations, to which we invited each of the students involved. Each group of students have separate instructions and requirements for participation, depending on the specific course they're studying. This is what my lot got: ------- Blogging on Course A4 A joint weblog ('blog') has been set up, which is being read and contributed to by your group and a class at Central Missouri State University in Warrensburg, Missouri, USA. The US students have assignments of their own connected with this blog, but your assignment is to include a direct reference to an input on the joint blog in each of your US Culture and Society essays, and in the essay or book review on Beloved. Bear in mind that these references will be to an individual's opinions or experiences, so you will need to balance each reference with information gleaned from other sources. The US students' assignments are such that you should be able to find relevant inputs for each of the optional essay topics. You can obtain your references either actively or passively. An actively obtained reference is one where you have an idea about what you want a comment on, and post an input specifically asking for it. Alternatively, you can pose a question and look for responses which will give you information about at least what the narrow sample of CMSU students think. Here are two examples of attempts to obtain your references actively: A. Did you vote in the Presidential election in Autumn 2004? Why? (if you did) Why not? (if you didn't) B. Turkey has been forced to abolish the death penalty to prove her democratic credentials in order to be able to apply to join the European Union. Why does the USA keep such a barbaric and anti-democratic penalty? A passively-obtained reference is simply one which you have read on the blog and copied from it directly, without engaging any other students in a dialogue about it. ----- I've deliberately avoided making active participation compulsory for my students - on much the same reasoning as that which stops English teachers who want their pupils to write from using written tasks as punishments! In other words, it's a lot to ask non-native speakers to participate actively with native speakers in exchanges of views … and anyway, the whole point is to promote easy and seamless communication between different groups of people, who're both contributing because they want to, rather than because they have to. Why use a blog, rather than a discussion forum? Ease of use is one answer. The threshold to participation is high enough already, without the participants having to log in and write in passwords, etc. We've also got the problem of IT departments (if you happen to have a good one, then all I can say is "congratulations - and enjoy!"). They're usually the most conservative part of an organisation which uses ICT, and usually try to limit what's done on 'their' system. So you can imagine what a hassle it would have been to have tried to get Swedish and US IT technicians to allow aliens into their networks! One final slight advantage is that you can see everything at once, just by scrolling down the screen, rather than having to click on topics one by one (I know you can do this on some fora too). The interface is much nicer too - at least I think it is. My own view is that all these technological toys we've got at our disposal are totally without value as tools for learning - until a teacher or a learner puts some there. This is how we've tried to put some learning value into the use of a blog - we'll know how we got on in May.

Jag har nämnt E-HELP för våra lärare och lärarutbildare i historia, och jag hoppas att de kan komma att börja bidra med idéer och spridning.