David Richardson

… another little aside about Karolinska (who still appear to be a bit ICT-ly challenged!). They recently formed a consortium and started an organisation called something like Karolinska University Systems, with e-mail addresses containing 'kus.se'. Only problem is that 'kus' is an obscene term in the other Scandinavian languages (part of the female anatomy), so the e-mail filters promptly deleted all the e-mail messages originating at Karolinska! It took quite a while before the major research establishments in Denmark, Norway and Finland managed to re-establish contact with their Swedish counterparts …

I'd say too, Anders, that you need to see copyright in a Swedish context. Now, I know that there are rules and regulations which are applied internationally, but when you look at the trouble other countries have with getting them enforced, you can see that the national context is still very important. One of the problems Anna Lindh had to deal with as Foreign Minister was the great statistics scandal at Karolinska (Sweden's foremost centre for medical research - and the body which awards the Nobel prize in medicine, for the uninitiated). A researcher at Karolinska published a paper in an international journal with a table in statistics which had been produced in the market leader in statistics programmes. A doctor in the USA read the article and mentioned to his brother over dinner what a nice programme his brother was responsible for producing and marketing! The brother idly checked whether Karolinska had bought any licences for the programme … and the Business Software Alliance promptly raided Karolinska. There were red faces all round - not only had Karolinska pirated this programme - they'd pirated loads of others too. It should have been an open-and-shut court case, with Sweden's premier research establishment paying millions of dollars in fines … except that good old nationalism got in the way. It took a threat of trade sanctions against Sweden by the USA to even get Karolinska to cough up a modest amount of compensation and promise not to do it again. In the meantime, the Swedish authorities and courts had done everything they could to slow things down and basically to forget about the whole thing. Now in the end, Karolinska did change its practices and start buying legal software only … but it took years, and, of course, no-one's head ended up on the block.

One of the things I really took exception to in the Guardian article Graham referred to was the implication that all that was needed to get more pupils to study MFL was more encouragement from teachers and parents. That's a very easy way of evading responsibility in my view. In my experience it is the 'structural factors' which play the most important role in education. If, for example, a pass at GCSE in a modern foreign language was a requirement for a university place (as, I understand, are passes in Maths and English), then the numbers of GCSE entrants would shoot up overnight. This doesn't absolve teachers of all responsibility, of course. In Sweden the previous government came up with this great reform of sixth-form colleges, one of whose effects was to make the average grade for all subjects the deciding factor in gaining a place at university. Since grades in French and German were generally lower, this resulted in a dramatic decline in the numbers of sixth formers studying French and German … which fed through to the universities, resulting in a dramatic decline of MFL students … which led to closures … which led to a virtual disappearance of teacher trainees wanting to be teachers of MFL … However, at the same time, much of the teaching of German in particular was stuck fast in the driest and least effective grammar-translation methodology (lists of prepositions that take the Accusative case, and all that rubbish). I've often had to gently enquire of university teachers of German who it was that trained all these teachers in schools who fail to enthuse their pupils and deliver first-year students of such poor quality to the long-suffering academics (yes, it was those same long-suffering academics!). So, to me it looks as if there's a double-whammy here: if your teaching in MFL is way below standard, then the minute the teaching environment becomes hostile, MFL dies off suddenly and dramatically, in much the same way that someone suffering from starvation will be killed off by a cold virus that an otherwise healthy person would hardly notice.

Not really, Marco. One of the factors we'll have to take into account is how well or badly the use of ICT fits in with what people do when they learn. I wasn't just talking about memorising facts about language - you have the same situation with the facts of any subject area. One of the major dangers I can see with ICT in education is the tendency of the philosophies that the technologies embody taking over and determining what it is that we call learning.

The question is, though, whether it's the memorisation or the ability to use the results of such memorisation which should be tested/rewarded. If it's the latter, then anyone who achieved the same results without the memorisation would presumably gain the same 'reward'. In terms of language learning, there's lots of information that needs to be internalised, and in many places, it's that internalisation which is seen as an end in itself (q.v. credits for 'Vocabulary'). However, I'd like to see the steps beyond internalisation as the real learning …

Eddie, this sounds really interesting - particularly the bit about creating a learning environment for ICT-based learning. I often ask teachers here at our university who they think has the most influence on students' attitudes to knowledge and their own learning. My answer is "the caretakers", since they are the ones who determine how the desks are set out, which in turn determines who speaks to whom, which direction the information flows in, etc, etc. We've been working for quite a while here on the ways you have to change your thinking when you start introducing ICT into a learning environment. One of the concepts we've developed is "The Cone of Input" (about which I've already posted on this forum, so I won't repeat myself now).

I'm accessing the Forum both from home broadband and from the office Ethernet system. I use a Mac in both places, both using OSX with Safari. I haven't even noticed that you've done anything

I use Dreamweaver for creating web sites and Safari for looking at them … but then again I'm lucky enough to be able to use a Mac!

Just another quickie mainly for Anders. The University of Gothenburg hosts an on-line 5p course called VIND, which I think stands for something like Video in Distance Education, aimed at people who want to include video sequences on on-line courses. I'm fairly sure that they must have taken this question up in a Swedish context. I'm sure you know about the BONUS-agreement for the educational use of printed materials in Sweden. It wouldn't surprise me if there isn't a similar agreement for pictures and video clips.

My name's David Richardson and I'm not really a History teacher at all! I was asked by John if I'd like to be associated with the E-HELP project and he reassured me that you need people who've used ICT tools in education, and people who've witnessed bits of history too! I'm a teacher of EFL (English as a Foreign Language), working as co-ordinator of distance education in English at a university in southern Sweden. I do teach British and US Culture and Society sometimes, and that involves a fair bit of history, though. I've been working with computers in education for a long while too. I've also programmed Sinclair ZXs and Apple IIes, but, like Mike, I'm still very computationally challenged. I've been working with the human side of things - if you like the C (communication) bit of ICT, rather than the I (Information) bit. If you click on the Distance Courses link in the bar at the top of this page, you'll come to our distance courses page. The links on the left lead to live courses … but we never think that people learn solely - or even mainly - from computer screens, so most of our courses are quite difficult to understand 'from the outside', so to speak. You need all the rest (Study Guides, lectures on CD, friendly comments from Internet tutors, etc) to really make sense of them. The Business Writing course is entirely web-based, though, so that's a bit of a stand-alone. I'm looking forward to working with you all - it's always interesting to see how people from other subject disciplines approach course design. And there's always some idea that's worth stealing!!

If you want a quick guide for Sweden, Nätuniversitet has produced a copyright guide for web-based materials. It'll be fine for Anders, but not so useful for everyone else, since it's only in Swedish! You can access it via http://www.netuniversity.se and then go forward to Legala handboken, or you can go there directly via: http://www.legalahandboken.netuniversity.se/

The film, 'Kes', has fond memories for me. Brian Glover (who made his debut as the sadistic games teacher) was one of my dad's teacher trainees at Swinton Day Training College, and was discovered as an actor on that film. A lot of the pupils were kids I'd gone to school with too (though we'd moved to London by then). I remember a coach trip to the south of France that my dad organised for his students. Brian Glover was one of them and spent the whole trip telling me and my brother the kind of jokes you get a lot of street cred for when you're 7 years old! Not quite on topic, but I thought I'd share this memory with you.

I've just been asked by a teacher in a school in Gnosjö in Sweden if I can recommend good books in English about 19th and 20th century history. He asked me about British history, but I'm sure he'd like to hear other suggestions too. What would you expert history teachers recommend?

Many eons ago, when I was a teacher of English and French in Dartford, I went on an in-service training course run by the ILEA (what a crime it was to abolish that body!). One of the presentations was from a school in North London who'd achieved great results in French like this: In the 1-3 years (of secondary school - as was) they exchanged their hours of French with their colleagues in other subjects. Each pupil got 1 hour/week in which they learned a different language up to a certain level of proficiency each term. At the end of the term the pupil received a certificate saying, for example, "I can buy an ice-cream in Moscow" or "I can read the headlines in the Rome newspaper". Then in years 4-5, the French teachers would get two whole afternoons per week, and I realise now that what they did was the kind of communicative language teaching I've become familiar with from English over the years. The years 1-3 activities primed the pupils to realise that a) there are different languages in the world, and you don't have to know everything to know something. Over the years I've taught people English in all sorts of contexts and cultures, and I don't really buy the idea that there are easy and more difficult languages - it all depends where you're coming from. There aren't even easy and more difficult structures. You might think that "what would the witch have done if the dwarfs had been at home when she called" is complicated, but the Swedish equivalent is almost a word-for-word transliteration (vad skulle häxan ha gjort om dvärgarna hade varit hemma när hon ringde). If I were having to teach, say, Swedish in the UK (why not?), motivation would be the first thing I'd have to tackle (Swedish footballers could be a good way in - get both the boys and the girls!), but I'd also have to make sure that I didn't make the language unnecessarily impenetrable by filling the pupils' heads with useless grammatical metalanguage that even Swedes don't understand (they call their noun 'genders' utrum och neutrum, which I've never heard a comprehensible explanation for!).

English is often introduced to children from Class 1 (7 year-olds) in Sweden, and organised teaching (with textbooks, etc) usually starts in Class 3. However, there's also a widely-held view amongst academic language didactics specialists that Swedish children here learn English despite the teaching they receive, rather than because of it. It's not difficult to see why we think this! School teaching is almost exclusively based on grammar-translation, and the version of grammatical metalanguage they use fell out of use in the English-speaking world in the 1950s (for very good reasons). My explanation for why language teachers in Swedish schools make such beginners' errors is, well, because that's what many of them are - beginners! I'm working on a PGCE course at the moment, for example, and the poor bloody infantry of teacher trainees are going to receive precisely 6 hours of training in how to teach English - despite the fact that they're all going to be teachers of English at secondary schools. I think that MFL teaching has a metaphorical mountain to climb in many countries in the world. We tend to put our most highly-qualified teachers to work on the pupils who need them least - the ones at the top. Then we entrust the vital task of teaching beginners to the teachers who have the least chance of success - people without even one term of study at higher level of the language they're supposed to teach, and who lack all but rudimentary training in language didactics. Fortunately highly-qualified doesn't always mean good, and poorly-qualified often does actually mean good (thanks to skewed priorities in higher education in many university departments), but it's a strange way to run language teaching.

Interesting article in today's Observer: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/sto...1312806,00.html

John wrote: A book has just been published in Britain called Key Issues in Women’s Work. In the book the author, Catherine Hakim, argues that: “For decades we’ve been told Sweden is a great place to be a working parent. But we’ve been duped.” She controversially argues that: “The glass ceiling problem is larger in family-friendley Sweden than it is in the hire-and-fire-at-will US, and it has grown as family-friendly policies have expanded. In Sweden 1.5% of senior management are women, compared with 11% in the US.” Hakin goes on to argue that Swedish women are paid around 20% less than Swedish men. Other European countries have a better record: Italy has a 15% pay gap, Spain a 12% gap and Belgium and Portugal an 8% gap. One of the major reasons for this is that 75% of Swedish women are working in the public sector – traditionally the lower-paid end of the employment market. -------- I think that Catherine Hakim is overstating her case a little - and missing a couple of crucial features of the Sweden's family policies. One of the main differences between being a parent in Sweden and being one in the UK or the US must be that the nursery schools actually exist here, and the rights to take time off at 80% of full pay to bring up children are, so far, unchallenged. There's a maximum fee set for full-time childcare which is set at around £250/month too. I'm sure Catherine's right that there are more female executives in the US than in Sweden, but I'd certainly prefer to be a parent in Sweden than the US! A common experience when showing visitors from the US around is that they take me on one side and ask me where the poor people are. They assume that they're being hidden away to put on a good show, but the truth is that, whereas there are poorer and richer people in Sweden, you'd be hard pressed to find anywhere as poverty-stricken as parts of just about any large city in the US or the UK. The Swedish system is good at fixing anomalies when they arise - but slow to recognise them. The private sector is on probation at the moment. If they don't redress this gender imbalance on boards of companies voluntarily, the government will probably just impose quotas on them until the imbalance is redressed. Something similar happened to make the Swedish Parliament one of the most equal in the world - the ruling party just decided to make every second name on the list of candidates (in strict numerical order) a woman. At the following election the Swedish Parliament became almost 50% female. However, to come back to the current discussion on this thread, Sweden's benefits came from hard and consistent political struggle. The opponents of equality, a woman's right to choose, etc, may have acquiesced in their past defeats, but that doesn't mean that they've accepted the rightness of the causes that won. There's a continuing attempt to swing society back to inequality and injustice, which requires the same kind of struggle all over again.

… and how successful are you in being listened to?! Actually, I'm sure you are … but a common problem is to get the buyers of the technology and the advocates of its introduction to listen to anything other than technical specifications. In sales terms, I'd call this talking about the features, rather than the benefits. Whenever I'm trying to help other teachers design an IT element into their courses, I start with a picture which has the course features in the middle, and then a number of elements acting upon them, which have to be taken into account. The one I always start with is 'budget' - and then the IT enthusiasts start squirming and yawning. One of the problems for them is that the minute you talk about the budget as a whole, you see what an enormous share the purchase of equipment and programmes has taken. Then you start wondering if you wouldn't actually have done better with a pencil and paper. I managed to shock a techie to the core the other day. We were discussing the VLE our place bought two years ago for a tidy sum, which has largely been gathering dust since. "OK," he said, "Which VLE would you have bought, if you think this one is so bad?" "I wouldn't have bought one at all," I said. "I would have started with the pedagogics and methodology." What? Not buy the latest toy? How can that be a good idea?

I don't know much about what's going on in the UK these days, but I've been working with IT in language teaching for quite a while now. I'd agree that training is one of the keys … and another is thorough and specific planning, not only of the contribution IT makes, but also of how the IT element fits in with everything else. In my experience there is a certain amount of basic computer training which could be useful to teachers of all subjects, but as soon as you start thinking of specific applications to teaching, you also have to get subject-specific. Another strike against VLEs is that the pedagogical model which informs nearly all the ones I've ever seen is a positivistic and fairly simplistic one. I've been discussing some of the learning objects produced by our teachers of business administration today, for example. It's really difficult for them to grasp that the pedagogical principles involved in people learning double-entry book-keeping might be different from the ones involved with art or dance or language learning. In particular, the basic facts of their world are all more or less known, whereas it's difficult even to talk in terms of basic facts when you're teaching literary criticism or discourse analysis. Heuristic models of knowledge are far more difficult (if not impossible) to programme in to computers - you almost always need a human interface somewhere … and then you're back to the old problem of having to trust humans, rather than relying on the spurious objectivity of machines.

There was an interesting phenomenon in Sweden in the early 1990s. In the 10 years or so up to 1991, the birth rate had gone up and up (there were even articles in Newsweek about it). Our daughter who was born in 1991 has always been in relatively large classes (her middle school had 3 classes of about 24 in her year). Then, in 1991, a conservative government got in, which preached a Thatcherite message. Their slogan was even "there is only one way to follow" (echoes of "there is no alternative"). That government only lasted 3 years, but managed to saddle Sweden with an enormous public debt, and also did its best to privatise everything in sight, starting with health and childcare. There was an immediate drop in the birth rate. In the year below my first daughter's, there are only two classes of 24, and in the year below that, even fewer. The middle-90s in Sweden were a time of cutting back, clawing back and trying to get public finances into some sort of balance again. Things are turning round now, and the daughter we've just had is part of an explosion in the birth rate. When she was born, there was even a queue to get from the delivery room to the maternity ward! The interesting thing is that the rhetoric of that conservative government was far harder than its actual actions, but that rhetoric seemed to be enough to cause a decline in the birthrate! Or at least you could say that the rhetoric antedated the decline - which might have been caused by all sorts of factors … However, nowadays, with readily-available contraception, it does seem like Swedish women will only have enough babies to renew the population if they feel secure and cared for, especially emotionally. You can imagine what chaos this is causing the school and university system, though. Next year, we're faced with drastic cutbacks and sackings … when we know that in the year after we'll need all those teachers and buildings back again! Careless talk by that conservative government might not have cost lives - but it's certainly wasted a lot of money!

I used to work for the Vocational Training system in Sweden and one of the nearby centres provided a wonderful example of this phenomenon. When computers started being introduced into that centre in the late 1980s, it was one of the caretakers who took an interest and soon became the de facto IT technician, even though he didn't really know a lot about it. More computers were bought and networks established … and then came the cuts. The management soon found out, though, that this caretaker had fixed himself a job for life (or at least as for as long as that centre was open), because he was the only person who knew where all the wires went. So they had to sack other caretakers, but leave his job alone.

I sympathise with Chris' reaction - I think there is a lot of impenetrable jargon used about e-learning. And when you decipher the jargon, you often discover attitudes and assumptions that you'd never accept if they were expressed in plain language. One of the messages I tried to convey to teachers in the mid-1990s when computers which were connected to the Internet first made their appearance in Swedish schools went like this: If you see your job as a teacher as being the transmission of information to your pupils, then these machines will always beat you, because they can find and distribute information much more quickly and comprehensively than you'll ever do. However, since when was the transmission of information a teacher's primary job? Surely what we are here for is to help our pupils develop their capacity to make judgements about things like truth and falsity, morality, reasonableness. Computers are just not designed to do this. -------- If you look at e-learning like this, then the decision about how and when to introduce computers into your teaching and the pupils' learning reverts to being a teaching decision, rather a technical decision. One thing I've noticed again and again is the way it's the test-making and -marking functions of these Virtual Learning Environments that gets all the attention from the people who sell them (IT companies) and the people who buy them (educational bureaucrats). I'd call that a typical beginner's mistake by amateurs. Learning is about a lot more than the ability to test certain types of information-retention (I won't call it knowledge) in the most efficient way and then to produce a 'league table' for comparison. However, that's what the amateurs get most excited about - which is probably why you're saddled with Ofsted, SATs and the like in the UK. In the early days of IT in education I felt the need for a word to describe what the amateurs wanted from their heavy investment in technology. They obviously didn't want anything that would be of real value to teaching and learning, because that would mean empowering teachers. What they wanted was "Something Posh to Impress the Punters" (or spip). When the people I work with now receive the latest directive or enthusiastic bit of sales talk from an IT technician, our first question is "is this for real, or is it a spip?". If it's a spip, as it nearly always is, we know to smile sympathetically, perhaps produce a quick, meaningless exercise that looks good (we've got a collection now), and then go back to what we were doing before we were interrupted.

I had a conversation with an Australian e-learning guru in 1997 about what our university should be encouraging. My line was "let 1000 flowers bloom" - hers was that it was time to impose a standard and a system for e-learning. The standard extended to the size and layout of accompanying paper study guides (you can guess the Times New Roman was the font they preferred!). It's not that I was against standards and co-ordination. It's just that if you get too dogmatic and technical at a stage when most teachers are very unsure about what they're doing in front of a computer at all - let alone what the best way of using one is - you end up stifling any creativity at birth. In the succeeding 7 years, it certainly looks to me like my line was the right one … but I would say that, wouldn't I!

As an aside, I think that David's response to Sidney Blumenthal's article shows that there can be good reasons for reproducing articles here on this forum which have appeared elsewhere first (which makes it more difficult to engage the author in dialogue). I read the Blumenthal article in the Guardian On Line - but I bet there are loads of people reading this forum who'd never come across it.

Reminds me of a conversation my dad had at a meeting of rather conservative academics during the Miners' Strike. They were going on about 'respecting the rule of law', so he asked them if any of them had ever exceeded the speed limit, after all, that's a law too. There was a certain amount of huffing and puffing … but basically it was collapse of stout party. On a sadder and more serious note, you could read David McKie's piece in today's Guardian comment. http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,...1305359,00.html