David Richardson

OK, so here's another one we just thought up at the coffee break. The suggestion came from my colleague, John Airey, but we haven't actually done it in practice yet. Our department wants to create a graduation ceremony … so we started talking about ceremonies and traditions. We already have an activity where you tell the class about yourself, but include at least one lie (then they have to work out which bit is untrue), and this suggestion grew out of that one. You collect some real traditions from the UK, and then make up about three times as many fake ones. You then describe - or better still demonstrate - or even better still get the students to demonstrate - a set of three of them (one real and two fakes). Then the class has to decide which one is real (i.e. this is just like Call My Bluff crossed with The Generation Game!). We started getting silly with suggestions like Thimble-Racing and Rolling the Cheese … but I bet they're really real! As a variation, especially if you've got a multinational class, you could get the class to create new rounds of the activity using traditions from their own cultures.

12thman: My main concern is not 'justifying' this action or that action, but understanding why such things happen. It's only then you can begin to do something about them. I suppose the 'genetic' argument which I've read in this debate and plenty of others is one hypothesis. By this I mean the argument that muslims are suicide bombers because they're [fanatical/irrational/crazed/ … fill in your own adjective] arabs - in other words, their behaviour is a result of their genes! However, as a hypothesis, it doesn't seem to me to stand up to any kind of detailed examination. It's difficult for me to say whether the suicide hijackers of the World Trade Center bombings thought they were exacting revenge or not. I learned long ago at university not to take people's *stated* reasons for a particular course of action at face value. However, even at the remove from the Palestinian issue that I am, I can think of plenty of prior actions which I can think of as creating the sense of helplessness that seems to be a trigger for suicide bombings. You could take the assassination of Folke Bernadotte, for example, which was ordered by some of the people who later became the political leaders of the state of Israel. Was that a terrorist act? Did Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin change from being terrorists to anti-terrorists when they came to power? Or is assassination only a terrorist act when it's committed by the wrong people? (Shades of the genetic argument above). Or you could take the shooting down by a US destroyer of an Iranian passenger jet on a scheduled flight. It's absurd to talk about the Lockerbie bomb as being 'justified' by that action, but it's easy to see why the wildly different world reactions to the two events could encourage lots of people to give up on the possibility of peaceful change. So where does the world go from here? I can't see any hope for reconciliation and peace until there is some recognition that many and grievous wrongs have been done to the Palestinian people. There won't be any hope, either, unless that recognition is coupled with action to redress those wrongs and try to prevent them happening in the future. Recognising those wrongs isn't the same as denying that others have had wrongs done to them - it's just that you have to take these different recognitions one at a time. If you don't, you end up muddying the moral water. I can well see that all this will just sound like more 'equivocating' to you. To me, obviously, it sounds like an honest attempt to take an objective look at a situation which has poisoned relations between many different peoples for more than 50 years. The problem with taking objective looks is that you often don't like what you see …

I sympathise a lot too (if that's any consolation!). Perhaps the way forward is to be low-key, but very factual in, for example, letters to newspapers, etc (if that's a useful means of expression in Alabama). Instead of, for example, just pointing out the USA's lowly place in the educational league of advanced countries, perhaps you could ask readers for their suggestions about how to improve the USA's standing in, for example, high school math scores. I have a writing course here in Sweden where some of the students are participating in a peer review exercise with composition course students at Central Missouri State University. It's fascinating reading the bulletin board, as Swedes, who can't imagine a country with the death penalty discuss crime and punishment with people from one of the states with quite a high record of executions. The US students are, perhaps, being more challenged in their beliefs than the Swedes, since there are completely different countries with different languages, belief systems, social and economic policies, etc just a couple of hours drive away from the Swedes, so they're more used to seeing several perspectives at once. However, it's easy for me to sit here and make suggestions - I'm sure it doesn't look so easy from where you're sitting! Good luck!

If you're still a bit shy about sharing ideas yourself (an outrageous suggestion, I know), here's another one, which I learned at some conference or other. Vocabulary Circles A bit like Hangman with a twist. You draw a big circle on the board, and write the numbers 1-6, evenly spaced around the circumference. You tell the class that you're going to write examples of, or words associated with the hidden word in the middle. You then draw a little line for each letter of the word in the middle, just like Hangman. Let's say that in the middle you've got: _ _ _ _ _ Then you write 'banana' against no 1, and wait for a guess. If you don't get one, you write 'orange' against no 2, and hope that someone can spell 'fruit' (the word in the middle). You write in 'fruit' … and then ask the class what word no 3 is, and no 4 and nos 7, 8, 9, etc, until they run out of fruit! (This is where you elicit which fruit they know - and which they'd like to know. Ever heard of 'cloudberry'? It's the English word for 'hjortron', which is very common in the north of Sweden, and which a Swedish class would like to say.) -------- I have a variant for the clever clogs, which goes 'sun', 'star', 'planet', 'time' … and then carries on to 'telegraph', 'newsweek', until someone gets 'newspaper' (Clark Kent worked on the Daily Planet, remember!). ------- If you want to see a couple of Flash animated vocabulary circles, go to: http://www.humsam.hik.se/distans/index.htm Then click on Teaching English to Younger Children on the left > Video Conferences > Video Conference 1 … and then on the Vocabulary Circles links on the left. In other words, not just a vocabulary exercise - could also be connected with cultural and societal aspects.

What an interesting debate - I wonder if Tony Blair and Charles Clarke actually wrote their contributions themselves … Let me give you a Swedish perspective. In Sweden, income tax is worked out on a local basis. In my area, this means around 32%. If you're a high earner (a bit higher than most teachers), you might pay an extra 10% as State income tax, but very few people are in that situation. And, er, that's about it. No Council Tax and only a modest pension contribution. At the end of each year, there's a tax return to be filled in (although most people just sign the one the tax authorities have already worked out), and there's a chance of claiming back any extra tax you've paid. Education is 'free at the point of delivery', including school dinners (the menus for which get published in the local newspapers each week) and 'fritidsgårdar' (after school clubs), at least in my area. There are no fees for higher education, and the student loan system is state-financed and -run, and has been around for a long time. Students repay their loans over their whole lifetime of work. There's a limit to the length of time they're allowed to keep loaning money, though, and they only get the next term's loan if they've passed last term's exams. ------- Now, of course, there's another side to it all. Sweden's a small country, with a long history of centralisation. There are all sorts of taxes which don't impinge on people's consciousness very much, such as the payroll taxes paid by employers and VAT, which is a fairly flat 25% (there are several bands, but most goods and services end up in the 25% band). On the other hand, Sweden's credit rating with Standard and Poor's was restored to the highest possible rating today (the country dropped back one notch in 1993, as it was dealing with the fairly disastrous state of the economy in the period 1991-1993). ------ It's difficult to make straight country-to-country comparisons, but it does at least seem to me that there are several alternatives … if the political will is there.

I agree! What a nice website … It looks like it was created in Inspiration http://www.inspiration.com. Even if it wasn't, this is a nice programme (available both for Mac and PC). It's a mind-map programme, where you can brainstorm ideas and then turn them into graphics, text-based plans, .gifs, .pict documents etc, etc. The intro page on our Business Writing course was made in Inspiration and then exported as a .gif graphic to Dreamweaver. After that I made the Inspiration graphics into hot spots … Definitely one of my essential tools …

Now this is a bit weird replying to my own post, but I'm trying to keep the posts separate. Here's an idea I developed a few years ago for using with technical English students: New Products For a class of 30, you'd need four short (half-page) descriptions of new products. New Scientist, trade magazines, company web sites are all good sources. If necessary, you identify difficult words and print them in an adjoining column, next to where they occur in the text. Phase 1 Divide your class up into groups of three or four (or occasionally five, if you've got 30). Arrange the groups into clusters of four, and give each group in the cluster a different description. I usually print the descriptions on different-coloured paper, with enough for one between two students. I.e. if you've got 30 students, you'll have 2 clusters with four groups in each cluster. The task for the students in this Phase is to read the text, make sure they understand it, and then produce a visual aid to be used by their Presenter with the following information on it: 1. The name of the product (which they might need to make up) 2. A sketch of the product 3. A one-line slogan, summing up what is good about the product (I give them the 'Guinness is good for you' slogan as an example.) At the end of Phase 1, the group chooses a Presenter, who'll go around and present the product to each of the other groups, using the visual aid the group has just produced to help her. Phase 2 Each group now has a Presenter who goes to the other groups and presents the product to them. The set-up is that of a Trade Fair where people are exchanging information, rather than a sales pitch. The people who stay behind are told that their job is to gather information about the products which they will have to relate to their Presenter when she gets back to their group. Therefore, they have to ask plenty of questions about it. Traffic management is important! I give the Presenters three minutes at each group, and time it with a stopwatch. Nobody moves on until the signal is given … which often encourages the hasty to take it easy and take a few questions. Sometimes the Presenters get to take the original information with them, sometimes they don't! In your class with two clusters, you'd have two rounds of presentations going on at the same time. Phase 3 Each Presenter has now done the job three times and it's time to go home. Now the rest of the home group know about 4 products, but the Presenter only knows about one of them, so it's time for them to share their information with the presenter. Finally, I take up any questions that might have arisen. ----------------- As you can see, this activity involves reading, writing, speaking and listening. It also involves a lot of changing of information from one form to another. It also involves authentic materials, originally written for native speakers. Nobody has to speak in front of more than three or four other people, and there's plenty of other activity going on in the classroom to lessen the amount of anxiety an individual might face. However, each Presenter gets to do the presentation several times, so they get a chance to improve on their performance. I always find that the amount of time needed for the final presentation is about 2/3 of the amount needed for the first one. The teacher is also way out of the spotlight, and is able to help students with specific problems on an individual basis. Everyone's also got lots to do at every stage in the lesson. The activity will take from 20-45 minutes, depending on the level of the group. So far as I know, this is an activity I developed myself, so you're free to take it wherever you like. However, we're all working in the same cultural environment, so it wouldn't surprise me if someone says "we've been using that for years - it's out of textbook X!" It isn't directly a computerised activity - I'm using ICT to disseminate it instead.

I teach English at a university-level institution in Sweden, and I've always been struck by how much re-invention of the wheel goes on. Perhaps we can start spreading the ideas around …

I don't work in the UK at all, but I do both teacher training and in-service training for qualified teachers of English as a Foreign Language in Sweden. The government here introduced a new teacher training system, including school-based training, about 18 months ago. If anyone wants to hear about our experience in our system, make a posting and I'll reply to it.

Yes, I remember it taking me a long time to do my first Flash animation. I'd broken my leg, and I was laid up with my PowerBook, so I had the time to, finally, read the manual and do the tutorials. The biggest problem wasn't the actual programming, which is fairly straightforward. It was more getting my head around how Flash animations are supposed to work (I still can't claim to be entirely there). The very first one I did was a vocabulary exercise about packing terms (crate, bale, barrel, etc) for Business Writing students. A colleague made some line drawings, which we scanned in, and then I created a series of 'pages' where students could guess, then get the right answer, then get a further 'page' with a lot of extra information (such as that bales are often used for soft, bulky materials, like wool and waste paper). Then we adapted an old Mario Rinvolucri activity: a maze about a hijack, also from a book that's gone out of print (at least as far as I can tell). This time there are a series of decisions to be made (do you negotiate, or appeal to the head of another government, or stonewall, etc?) on each 'page'. Depending on what you answer, you get a whole other series of decisions. Another adaptation of this particular piece of programming is the Writing the Date exercise that's somewhere in the Business Writing course, where students can click on a number of alternative ways of writing the date and see a short commentary on it (e.g. 02Feb04: this is the way many large international organisations write the date) - useful for Swedes who use the ISO standard (2004-02-02) which hardly anyone else does! I'm also writing another variant of the Maze exercise with my 12 year-old daughter called 'The Empty House': you're on the way home from skating practice when you hear noises coming from the creepy empty house halfway down your street. Should you call the police, tell your parents, or go in and find out who's making the noises? Another current exercise is a trouble-shooting exercise for the Swedish Army which involves negotiating with a civilian workshop for use of their equipment when you're on a peace-keeping mission. I'm also using the basic programming I did for the Maze exercise. As you can see - it gets addictive! The basic principle I try to work to is that the real work happens in the heads of the students using the computer, so I try to include a series of decisions which involve discussion among people, rather than fancy tricks inside the box.

So … why use on-line material at all. I was having a discussion with some avid First Class users a few years ago about web-based materials and I mentioned the advantage that you could show pictures easily. The immediate response was "but why would you want to have pictures in teaching materials?" Advantage no 1 is therefore that you can easily make material in colour available to your students. I've just been sitting making sound files this morning, whilst the plumber is here at home. If you go to this page http://www.humsam.hik.se/distans/existstud...ish110index.htm and click on the Phonetics Exercises links on the left, you'll see what I've been up to. Advantage no 2 is that you can make things available to your students that either can't be printed on paper, or would cost the earth to find as commercial products. The last link on the left on the portal page is entitled Novish. It's an exercise from a book that's now out of print. I programmed it in Flash, which took me a while to learn (by painstakingly going through the tutorials that came with the programme). I'm not a programmer by any definition of the term, but this one works for me. I'm working on a series of reading comprehension exercises using Flash too at the moment, where I'm taking the basic programming I did for the Novish exercise and just repeated it. If you compare my Novish exercise with the one in the paperback book, mine works better, because I don't have to keep writing "don't look at the answers until you've had a go at the exercise". I suppose this is a variant of Advantage no 2, but perhaps it's a separate advantage in its own right. How many more advantages can you think of? BTW, I've used electronic whiteboards in class - they're a great way of showing people web sites, for example.

So … on to my personal experience of VLEs. A confession to start off with … I gave up on the type of VLE with loads of different functions a couple of years ago! The problem I had with them has very little to do with the specific functions of specific VLEs - in my view they all more or less as good, or bad as each other. It was more a question of how they fitted in to the organisations I was working for and in to my philosophy of learning. To give you an example: the university where I work bought a Swedish system called Learngate about 18 months ago. To create pages on Learngate, you need the services of expert programmers, since everything is controlled by scripts. The result of this is that it's very difficult to avoid the 'standard' design the programmers have decided on … which is fine if you like it. I don't, so I don't use it. It's very difficult to convince IT people that standardisation in the appearance of course materials is often counter-productive. My students need to feel that they're in an environment that I've created. Our Learngate system has also spawned a work group for the production of Learngate courses. However, they haven't realised that the production of on-line courses is a dynamic process - it's not a question of producing a shrink-wrapped 'product' which can be kept unchanged for a couple of years. I used to use a really nice Irish VLE, called TopClass … but they don't make it any more … Nowadays I use two systems: open web pages (our portal page is at: http://www.humsam.hik.se/distans/index.htm), and a desktop video conference system from a company called Marratech (http://www.marratech.com). The great advantage of open web pages is that my students don't need user names and passwords. This not only removes a great source of worry and irritation at the beginning of a term, but it also means that my students' first contact with the web site is an inviting 'welcome', instead of an impersonal 'enter your password'. There are some downsides, of course. It's more difficult to maintain copyright, for example, and to break other people's copyright, by using their material without permission. However, the nature of on-line material is that it changes all the time. You can't set it in stone, so it matters less if other people borrow it. On-line courses for me are also collaborations between lots of different forms of interaction. If you look at some of our on-line courses via the portal page, you would find it very difficult to get a clear picture of what goes on, since a lot of the interaction is student-student, teacher-student and Internet tutor-student. As you can guess, I'm a distance teacher, so a lot of the advantages of on-line work for me perhaps don't apply to 'campus-based' teaching. I'll post another message in a minute with a few thoughts about why on-line material is good in itself.

I suppose I use Virtual Learning Environments quite a lot. I've written about our experience on the E-Learning Initiative part of this forum too. Basically VLEs *claim* to give pupils and teachers the same kinds of access to each other and to course material as they get in the class. My own assessment is that we're quite a way from that at the moment. Most VLEs have some kind of chat function (where everyone talks to everyone); some kind of whiteboard (where everyone can 'place' web pages, documents, etc and draw things on it); and some kind of private chat (where individuals can talk - or 'whisper' - to each other). Users can sometimes create their own course pages (sometimes this requires the services of programming experts), and many VLEs have very sophisticated tools for tracking how much individuals use the systems and how often they look at particular pages. There are also often more or less crude ways of constructing tests and recording results. There's often a heavy emphasis on multiple-choice, since a) the Americans go for this in a big way, and they're the biggest market; and computers can handle multiple-choice test much more easily than most of the other kinds. How well and quickly they work depends on the amount of bandwidth you have available, and on the quality and level of sophistication of the equipment you have at each end. The effectiveness as learning aids and the usefulness to the teacher depend quite a lot on the teachers (and others) who put content into the VLEs. The norm, in my experience, is that VLEs are bought by IT Departments, with very little input from end users. Subsequently, only the enthusiasts use them … and even they give up after a while! IT technicians seem to think that the Windows 'tree structure' is a smart way of organising information … which is my explanation for why the 'navigation' structures of so many VLEs look the way they do. I'll put up another post in a while talking about what I've done with VLEs.

Teaching in Sweden Let me start by saying that I teach in higher education in Sweden … but I've done a fair amount of work in the state school sector too. Some facts and figures: The Swedish school and pre-school system is organised like this: Day nursery (from as young as 6 months old to age 5/6): fee-paying, but a low ceiling has been set on fees (around £200/month). Full-time or part-time, parents have to have jobs in order for their children to qualify. For families where one of the parents is at home (could well the father, since maternity and paternity allowances are generous and long), there are various non-fee paying alternatives. Sometimes day nurseries are organised by parent co-operatives. Pre-school (age 5/6-7): full-time, non-fee paying, a bit like reception class in the UK. Compulsory School (age 7-16): 9 grades, divided into Grades 1-6/7-9. Instruction in English starts at Grade 3/4 (generally); 2nd foreign language instruction starts at Grade 6/7. Lots of 'private' (i.e. entirely state-subsidised!) alternatives, including Waldorf, Montessori and Steiner schools. No exams at the end of Grade 9, instead a set of centralised SATs in English, Swedish, Maths … and something else that I can't remember. Otherwise, grades set by teachers. 6th Form/High School (age 16-19/20): divided into 3 or 4 grades (technical subjects usually have an extra year). Highly individualised study (pupils usually take around 13-15 subjects, but have a lot of say about which ones they take and when) and lots of 'private' alternatives. Similar testing regime as in Grade 9. Further education: Folkhögskolan (a sort of full-time, campus-based further education version of Open University!); Högskolan (able to award first degrees in all subjects and higher degrees in some specific areas); University (comparable to the pre-1992 British universities). Outside further education organisations: Study Circles (offering evening classes in some subjects - low paid instructors); KomVux (council-run, state-regulated adult education, offering the same courses and qualifications as the school system, but to adults); distance courses (many coordinated by the National Centre for Flexible Learning). -------- What you think an educational system is like depends on where you're coming from. As you can see, the Swedish system is very non-exam oriented, and the focus is on individual and group development. In the right school and with the right teachers, this can be great. In the wrong environment, it can be hell! There is plenty of inspection, but Swedish society is very non-judgemental - the aim is to help to improve, rather than to point out what is wrong. All Swedish educational establishments have a high degree of pupil, student and parent involvement in the running of them, starting right from Grade 1, where pupils sit on the school and class councils, running right up to universities, where the students have more representatives on the Board than the staff do. There's a general shortage of qualified teachers in Sweden, so lots of long-term employees in schools and universities lack formal qualifications. Generally, though, in the school system teachers teach at least two subjects (such as English and German) and sometimes more. There are two parallel economies in Sweden: the tenured and the untenured. If you're tenured, you are very difficult to get rid of. If you're untenured, you generally have a succession of short-term posts. However, if you work in the same place for three years out of five, they are obliged by law to turn your position into a tenured one. Nearly everyone in Sweden who works is in a trade union - unemployment benefits are administered via the union, so you've got a powerful incentive. When you're looking for a job, or when you're in a job, you have the absolute right to find out from the union and the organisation a) what it's like working there; and exactly how much everyone in the organisation gets paid. EU citizens who live here are entitled to loans and grants to study (for example to get Swedish qualifications), and the student loan system is fairly benign, compared with the UK (your outstanding loan is written off when you retire, basically). You'll be required to show proficiency in Swedish to work in schools in a tenured position, eventually, but you get free instruction, and often a grant, to learn Swedish. I've got no idea how the pay and conditions compare with other countries, but Swedish flats (outside the big cities) are generally large, warm and fairly cheap. You rarely rent furnished accommodation … but there are plenty of second-hand shops where you can buy good used furniture. Most of the really useful links are in Swedish! Here's one from the Tourist Board in English, though: http://www.sverigeturism.se/smorgasbord/sm...iety/education/ Hope this has been useful. If you want to ask specific questions, you'd probably best e-mail me. david.richardson@hik.se

I've often thought that language teachers who once used language labs are particularly immune to the blandishments of IT gurus! In Kuwait, for example, we had a 104 booth language lab, with around 10 technicians working full time keeping around 80% of them working (on any given day). It looked very impressive to the casual visitor … but the educational value of them was very limited. The problem was that the content had so little attention paid to it, compared with the technology. Of course, we teachers *could* write and record better material … but in comparison to all the other things we could do to make our teaching better, the language lab always lost out. I ran into the same syndrome a couple of years ago here in Sweden at a demonstration of the latest computerised business English course. The programming was really something, with artificial intelligence being used to generate 'random' conversations. The problem was with the inputs. I got a strong impression of a bunch of underpaid EFL teachers getting their revenge. For example, take the scenario of a businessman coming through customs. Customs Officer: Could you come over here please, sir. Businessman: Are you talking to me? All the EFL teachers in the room burst out laughing and starting producing their favourite Robert de Niro impression (I don't see anyone else here. You must be talking to me!). The poor salesman had never heard of Monty Python's Hungarian phrasebook!

What do you mean by 'support programme'? Is this support from teachers in using ICT, or students in learning English?

My own feeling is that computers are simply the latest tool or technique we have in the eternal striving to let our pupils/students free, so that they can learn. We know that knowledge is something that each creates within themselves. The challenge for teachers is always to create the environment where learners have personal 'tools', access to information, physical surrounding, etc in order to create knowledge. In my view, in so far as computers allow this to happen, they have a useful educational function. My explanation for why this type of opinion is so unpopular with purveyors of computer equipment and programmes is that it re-establishes a vital role for the teacher. She can't be sidelined or replaced by a machine, since the creation of these 'safe and empowering learning environments' is something that seems to be a quintessentially human activity - well, at least at the present level of technical development! (BTW in the absence of an impersonal pronoun in English to use instead of 'he' and 'she', I have chosen to use 'she'.)

I've heard the Betamax - VHS argument for years too. The reason I think it's irrelevant is that video tapes basically do two things (play and record), whilst computers do lots of things. I've often had the experience of working in educational organisations where the vast majority of teachers use PCs, but where nearly all the innovative work is being done by the people who don't use PCs. My explanation for this situation is that the idea that educational development is a matter of writing a killer educational app is an illusion. Innovation seems to come from the ground up, and from teachers who have first the confidence and much later the time to innovate. My observation, as a non-PC Windows user, is that large numbers of Windows users seem to have learned *not* to be confident with computers - even when they work, you never know when the next crash, or computer virus, or sudden incomprehensible message from the IT support department is going to come along. I agree with the previous contributors: this is potentially an enormous problem for Microsoft and its loyal supporters. IT is expensive enough already - and the returns, in terms of improvements to the job in hand, are still fairly scanty.

I've been using a Mac since 1989. I just happened to start on one, and I've never been forced to stop using one (which is the commonest reason I've heard over the years for why people switch from Mac to PC). I use PCs occasionally, and I always get slightly riled with them (yes, even those running Windows XP). I remember an interview with Steve Jobs where he was asked what he really had against PCs running Windows. His answer, eventually, was "they're so shoddy". That's my reason for keeping on using a Mac. I'm in the happy position now where I was able to specify that I wanted a Mac when I was at interview for the job I have now. I'm the only person in the entire faculty who uses one … and it isn't a problem at all. Our central IT technicians don't like it - but Macs are notoriously reliable, so their dislike doesn't affect my work. As to why I like working with a Mac, there was a good answer in a Swedish computer magazine a couple of years ago: "jag trivs med min Mac" (I feel happy with my Mac - although the Swedish phrase conveys a greater depth of meaning than that!). And I suppose that my bosses have realised that having a teacher who's happy with the tools he has to use is actually quite a good thing.

I've just put a post in the E-learning debate, where I describe the 'blended learning' course I'm working on right now. I take an Orwellian view of all these terms! In my career we've gone through DE, DL, O/DL, OL, CL … and now we're on to BL! However, the actual activity has only changed as new technology and financial conditions have changed … and those changes have tended to be cosmetic, rather than conceptual. If we can't quite work out what we mean by this term 'blended learning', perhaps that's an indication that we don't actually know what it is. And if we don't know what it is, how can we know whether we're doing it 'right' or not? I come down on the side of the argument that says that there's no such thing as a specific, discrete set of IT-based teaching skills. In my view, if you're a good teacher f2f, you'll be a good IT-based teacher too.

Interesting input from John. I confess: I'm one of those 1970s-trained teachers (Goldsmiths' 1976-77), and, as a teacher trainer nowadays, I agree that one of the big challenges is to get trainees and young teachers to think for themselves - and to think outside the box. Sweden's got a national curriculum … but it lacks the detailed targets and general outside government interference that seem to grace the UK. In a cynical sense, I ought not to be even trying. In my field of English teaching, I'll always have a job putting right the misconceptions about how English works that the school system has taught my students! The same goes for IT-based education too. One of the big problems with spips is that they aren't really much use, once the VIPs have moved on, but they've cost a lot of money. Here's another example of the kind of development John described in this last posting. I've just been in the frozen north of Sweden for two days to start work on a new IT-based course for the Swedish Army. You'll find the website here: http://www.humsam.hik.se/distans/metois/metoisindex.htm. However, there won't be much to see for a few weeks, since we're now in the materials-production stage. This course has got a lot of the characteristics of the IT-based courses I've worked with in the last few years (strange, that, since I'm designing this one too!): the students are more or less 'static' at the military training base in Östersund, but the teachers are highly mobile (since the entire mainland Britain would fit in the space between Östersund and where I live). The course is niche-based: there aren't many technical officers in the Army, and they need rather a different course from line officers. There aren't any off-the-shelf materials - no-one's going to produce a textbook which could only be bought by a few hundred individuals at most. The whole situation is new: the Swedish Army has only just started requiring all the officers to serve abroad if needed. And I don't know anything about the technical area covered - I'm an English teacher … but I've got a very co-operative major helping me. The course production budget is around 25,000 SEK, or, let us say, £2000, and just about all of that is in my time. However, when we've finished, we'll have a course which will run with minimal editing and re-writing for at least three years, so you could argue that each year's course production cost is under £700. Now, I know that it's going to be a fun course, which the participants are going to see as unique for them, with lots of features of life in Kosovo which they can readily identify with. That's going to help them to learn, since the 'dramaturgy' of the course (to borrow Hillar Loor's terminology) invites them in and gets them involved over a 10 week period. We've created a 'county' in Kosovo where everything happens. We've got the technology we need already - anything we don't have we'll do without. I'll be writing tape scripts and recording them on my Mac using SoundStudio (a cheapo sound editing programme). We'll be taking digital photos, and my colleague in the Army will have to set up some convincing typical faults on Army vehicles in the workshop to be photographed. There'll be an audio CD, some Flash animations (mostly problem-solving exercises), a web site and some printed materials, all sharing the same graphic profile. And the good thing will be that once all this is done, we teachers will be able to concentrate on working with the students as individuals. We'll still be using IT tools for communication … such as the telephone! (Well, there'll be an hour of ISDN-based video conferencing and a couple of hours of Marratech meetings.) Now, as John points out, how is a commercial supplier of teaching materials ever going to be able to compete with this? I remember a situation a couple of years ago when we were preparing technical English materials for a distance centre linking St Petersburg and Sweden, when we tried to inflate our costs as much as we could … but we still couldn't get them over about £20,000. Our counterparts from the publishing world were going to start with £1,000,000. And, in the end, guess who actually produced a working course! We may well be heading for the 'dark ages' of materials production in a few years when people of my generation retire … but what I'm doing isn't rocket science! I'm just trying to solve real problems with the tools I have available. As the young teachers coming through find that their lives as teachers are increasingly stultifying, and that nothing seems to work, I think that there's a very good chance that they'll re-invent the wheel I work with now, and that things will get back on track. BTW, what I meant by a 'synthesis' of 1st and 2nd waves is personal contact and support (from the 1st wave) on a mass basis (from the 2nd wave). After that, there are probably going to be lots and lots of differences. On the other hand, in my field of language teaching, there's probably only been one real innovation in the last 2000 years (the tape recorder) - just about everything we do now was being done by the Greeks in Roman times, they just didn't do it with so many people at the same time!

We've often faced this problem of defining what we're doing where I work in Sweden. At once stage the Swedish Net University was fairly fundamentalist in its definition: if you met the students at all face-to-face (f2f), you weren't doing IT-based distance education. Fortunately, reality came knocking on the door. In my (fairly limited) experience, most of the 'fundamentalists' are characterised by rarely, if ever, having actually run an on-line course. Our problem was to make sense of the confusing array of practices and technology which we had before us. What follows is our best shot so far. Our starting point was this quotation: “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.” Tiffin, J & Rajasingham L, In Search of the Virtual Class, London, Routledge, 1995 So we started playing around with the idea that 'bandwidth' could be a common denominator for assessing what kinds of learning environments we wanted to create and what kinds of inputs you could put in them. If you imagine that f2f involves maximum bandwidth, then ISDN-based video conferencing requires a little less, e-mail a little less, whilst the minimum is probably the amount used by the printer to print out the paper originals of your study guides, etc. Thus we're able to make a connection from our work in the classroom, through the various web and media links, right to the paper copies we use. The questions then are of the type "How do we distribute our resources between the various types of bandwidth we're using?" and "Are we using this particular bandwidth in the best way?" If you put the circles representing the different bandwidths together, you get something which we call "The Cone of Teacher/Tutor Input". In other words, if we teachers are going to make an input, this is where it's going to happen. The students' learning, however, is the cylinder, formed by extending the maximum amount of bandwidth all the way through the course. The challenge to us as teachers is to provide inputs via narrow bandwidths (which are also cheaper) to create learning experiences for students which make use of as much of the rest of the bandwidth which is available. To give you one example: someone I know was once running a course in local history in a part of Sweden called Hälsingland. One early summer's evening, as he was being driven home from a course meeting, he took a digital photo of a local beauty spot out of the car window. When he got home, he posted the blurry photo on the web server, with the question "Is this the soul of Hälsingland?" Within 24 hours every single student on the course had responded with stories, anecdotes, reminiscences, etc, and had started responding to each other's responses. This is what I call a good use of bandwidth: the teacher used relatively little, but the students' learning experiences used up a lot. So, for me, the question "to blend or not to blend" betrays a misunderstanding of the nature of the activity we're all engaged in. The question is "what are we trying to do?" If we know that, then we can make an informed judgement about how we're going to use the bandwidth available to get there.

This is the 'theoretical' bit of the post I've just written … The first thing that strikes you about e-learning is that it seems to cost a lot of money! There's infrastructure to invest in; the students seem to need loads of equipment; and the materials cost the earth to produce. The organisational response is then to spend ever-increasing amounts to achieve ever-diminishing returns, until the whole thing fizzles out! However, I think that the basic problem is that everyone's acting without thinking things through first - which is always a recipe for high budgets! One problem with infrastructure investment that I've come across again and again is the desire to standardise at too detailed a level. For example, "everyone has to have Windows XP". As soon as you standardise sensibly, such as "everyone has to have access to a computer connected up to the Internet", things open up. This is why we use open web pages at the moment - we trade off copyright protection against eliminating the need to distribute passwords and user names. This is a pedagogical decision: I don't want the first experience our students have with our courses to be the equivalent of the US Customs and Immigration Service. The 'access' is important too - occasionally we need to use more sophisticated equipment and programmes than you can reasonably expect people to buy themselves … but that's what libraries and Study Centres are all about. (You can read more about Study Centres at http://www.nitus.se/ - then click on the Union Jack). There are other great advantages of Study Centres - they have friendly, local staff, and they encourage students to see learning as a social activity. When it comes to materials production, the problem is that organisations and governments want spips ('spip' means "Something Posh to Impress the Punters" - it's a term I coined a few years ago to describe projects whose basic function is to justify the spending of project funds, rather than to do anything useful). It's difficult to quantify (and include in the PR material) the feelings of encouragement and supportiveness our Internet tutor in Queensland gives our on-line students - and yet, without them, many of our students would fall at the first hurdle. If your level of ambition is lower, you can actually produce materials that work at much lower cost. We create plenty of income for our department, so they're prepared to make the modest investments in time and programmes we need in order to produce our e-learning materials. Doing it this way means that we get what we want, and we feel that it makes our lives easier and more fun - the perfect recipe for greater fulfilment at work. The day may come when we've produced things which are worth investing much more time and money in … or it may not. We're working in a niche-based environment, though, where the idea that it makes sense to have a 'one-size-fits-all' solution is alien. What's more likely is that individual course elements may be tarted up a bit, but even this isn't essential. One unexpected feature of our crude web pages is that students feel at home with them - we don't want them to get too sophisticated. Underlying all this is a feeling that the paradigm currently being used by many organisations is basically wrong. My thinking has been inspired by Alvin Toffler's 'Third Wave'. 'First wave' education mirrored first wave society: an aristocratic elite received a lot of personal attention, which was paid for by the sweat of uneducated peasants and slaves. Thus you had Socrates and the Athenian world-wide web (i.e. instead of going out and looking for inputs, they eventually turned up on the Agora and could be examined and questioned). Second wave education was all about mass production - you needed a certain minimum level of education for the masses so that they could operate the machines. Thereafter you leave things to ever-specialised experts. There might be all sorts of clever things being done in the laboratories and testbeds, but the ultimate aim is to develop something which can be mass-produced. I'd say that this is precisely where the UK government's e-learning strategy is … which is why it won't work, since we've moved on from the second wave now. The problem with describing third wave education is that we are only on the threshold of it. However, just as the second wave took with it features of the first, I think that the third wave in education will be a synthesis of the preceding two. This would imply combining the level of attention to the individual typified by the first wave Oxford don's Study, with the universal access of the second wave state education system. Before we had computers and IT technology, this was prohibitively expensive … and anyway, it wasn't what society thought it needed. But why move on at all? If Toffler is to be believed (a moot question, that), the reason is that we have no choice. Just as the second wave armies cut the first wave ones to shreds (most of the time, although the Polish cavalry eventually gave Charles X of Sweden a run for his money), third wave learners are going to be, en masse, just much more useful to our world - and much more fulfilled as people - than second wave ones. The problem at the organisational level is that all the things the organisation can usefully invest in are just precursors to development. The government can write out a 'strategy', and the university can buy us all a computer, but the real development takes place on a person-to-person level. And guess who's both closest to that level, and the only person capable of making the development happen? The teacher! Which is why the second-wave strategy of de-skilling teachers and investing in technology is, IMHO, bound to fail.

I've just been reading through the debate from the beginning. Before I begin my post, I can add that the Canadian university where the faculty went on strike to avoid having their lectures video-ed and their lecture notes posted on the web was York University - as far as I'm aware, it was the first successful strike against e-learning. I work at the equivalent of an old polytechnic in the south of Sweden, and I've been involved in e-learning for quite a long time. It's difficult to put a start date on my experience. Would it be the bank of exercises we created on an Apple IIe in Kuwait in 1983? Or the extensive use of ISDN-based video conferencing which I started using in 1992? Or our use of First Class in 1993? Or our first web-based course in 1994, which attracted students from Japan and Hong Kong to deposit their course fees in a small branch of a Swedish bank half-way to the Arctic Circle? In other words, I share the opinion that we haven't successfully defined what 'e-learning' is … which makes it quite difficult to create a strategy for encouraging e-learning. We're lucky in Sweden, when it comes to the provision of IT infrastructure. There's also been a relatively huge amount of money available for development. However, my experience has also been that a grant of project money has nearly always been a poisoned chalice for the teachers who take it - the consequence of using the money has often been to remove that teacher from the classroom into the circuit of conference-attenders and government advisors, leaving virtually nothing behind. At the same time, and on a grass roots level, there has been lots of development - which usually doesn't get known about outside Sweden, principally because it is driven by practitioners, who are much more interested in getting their jobs done, than in writing papers and attending conferences. Let me give you a couple of practical examples. I started a Composition Course (in writing academic essays) last Saturday. In October, I happened to meet a lecturer from Central Missouri State University here in Sweden, and we agreed to pair his Composition Course up with ours. Since I 'meet' my students (who're spread out over an area about the size of lowland Scotland, say from the Border to Stirling) via video conference every other week, I was able to set it up with them. Then my US colleague set up a 'meeting' between me and his students via iChatAV and a video projector to sell the idea to them. Now it's up and running … We've just invested in the server software for the Marratech on-line meeting system (http://www.marratech.com), so our students and theirs will be showing each other their drafts and talking about them on-line every now and then. The students don't have to have the technology themselves, since they're all attached to Study Centres that do. Another example: I've been working with a team of Internet tutors in New Zealand, Australia and Spain since 1996. I've also got access to our Internet server, so I can make simple (or do I mean crude?) web pages without having to get IT technicians involved. This means that when students start on-line English courses, they immediately get in touch with native speakers who have the focus to work with them on a one-to-one basis. I find this extremely difficult, since my focus has to be on creating a feeling that you're part of a group, which is also a very important aspect of an e-learning course. You can take a look at what we do from our distance English portal page at: http://www.humsam.hik.se/distans/index.htm My point is that I think that the centralised initiatives, whether they are from within or outside the organisation, are almost doomed to failure in the present environment. I think that the reason for this has a lot to do with the nature of learning, the nature of people and the nature of organisations … This post is, perhaps, long enough now. I'll write another one about what I think is the 'theory' behind what we're doing.

I trained as a teacher of English and Drama at Goldsmiths' College in London in 1976-77. I then worked for three years as a teacher of English and French at Dartford Technical High School for Boys before taking a job as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in Härnösand, Sweden in 1980. Since then I have taught EFL in Sweden, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Angola, and taken up other assignments and jobs, such as pedagogical advisor to a World Bank project in Trinidad and Tobago, and publisher's representative for one of the educational publishing houses. I've been back in Sweden since 1991, working at university level teaching English Literature and Language, as well as a fair amount of ESP (English for Specific Purposes). I've been working with distance education since 1981, and with IT-based distance education since the very early 1990s (Sweden's a very high-tech country). Currently I am responsible for IT-based distance education in English at the University of Kalmar (a 'polytechnic' in the south of Sweden). You can get an idea of what we do here from the distance English home page (http://www.humsam.hik.se/distans/index.htm) - although the page will almost certainly need updating whenever you visit it! We work with a variety of constellations of teachers and students, using a team of Internet tutors based in New Zealand, Australia and Spain. Edited to activate hyperlink