David Richardson

Another addictive site is: http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/ Well, at least if you're interested in UK English. I found it when my daughter had to do a presentation at school about Northern English (I'm a northerner myself). One of the reasons why English-speaking people often find French accents in English sexy is that the French are tending to pronounce each syllable with more or less equal weight … which makes them speak more slowly and distinctly … which makes their listeners think that the French person is really interested in them! There's a famous Cointreau advert in the UK in which a French man in a restaurant just reads the back of the Cointreau label … and every woman in the place hangs on his every word. Training certainly helps if you're going to do a lot of EFL, Peter, but don't underestimate the power of example. People like me who've been doing it a long time have to fight to gain the freshness and enthusiasm that you probably had in Korea! One thing I've had to learn painfully is that just because I'm quite passionately interested in the way you can use English to send all sorts of messages to each other - especially ones you didn't intend to send - not everyone is!

I'll tell my colleague Jean Stevenson about your site. She's just created an on-line course called English for International Nursing. She got 191 applicants first time out (just from within Sweden).

Actually, they're about right. If we could use phonetic characters on a forum like this, you'd be looking at /[schwa]n/ for 'an' most of the time, rather than /æn/, which is the 'a' sound in the word 'pat'. 'and' is also typically pronounced with the schwa and only exceptionally with æ. (Schwa, by the way, is the phonetic 'upside-down e', and represents the vowel sound most English-speakers make in the very centre of the mouth - it's the commonest vowel sound in English). What happens when people speak a stress-timed language like English is that the 'information words' are pronounced 'properly' and the 'grammar words' in between (like 'a', 'an', 'are', 'to' and 'for') have their consonant and vowel sounds 'squashed' to retain an even rhythm of stressed syllables, with more or less the same amount of time between them. This 'squashing' ranges from the reduction of vowel sounds from, say, /æ/ to /[schwa]/ as in 'an' to the complete elision of both vowel and consonant sounds. Take this exchange, for example: Ju wanna go out tunight Well, DO you? The 'ju' is actually 'do you', and it's a 'grammar' expression (the 'information' is 'want', 'go out' and 'tonight' - we know this because if you were saying this on a bad cellphone connection and your listener heard only this bit, she'd understand the question, whereas if this bit was lost, she wouldn't know what you were saying). In the check question, though, the auxiliary 'do' comes back with its 'proper' pronunciation, because it's suddenly become an important 'information' word. This is why my students face the painful realisation that looking up the phonetic transcription of a word in a dictionary doesn't always help them to transcribe - it's how the word functions in an entire sentence that's important. This has nothing to do with 'sloppiness' - it's a natural function of a stress-timed language like English. Native speakers are also notoriously self-deluding about the sound of their own speech. There's a famous story about Denmark where the word for 'I' is 'jeg'. 'Jeg' has two pronunciations: the 'street' /jay/ and the posh /jeg/. 99% of respondents said '/jay/ sæg /jeg/ (I say /jeg/)! George Mason University has a fascinating site called the Speech Accent Archive (http://accent.gmu.edu/). Check out the English native speakers and look at the phonetic transcriptions of their contributions.

Let them know that 'private' in the Swedish context doesn't mean quite the same as it does in other systems. None of the 'private' schools in Sweden is a fee-paying school. Instead they get nearly the same state grant per pupil as the local authority schools, but are run independently of the local authority school system. Let me know what you come up with. If you want me to approach Calmare International School, it'd also be good if you could send me a document describing what you see the project as being all about. Posting it here, and sending it to me directly (my e-mail address is at the bottom of this post) would be a good idea - just in case this forum messes up the formatting in some way, but allowing other readers to see what you've got in mind. BTW, Swedish schools break up at the end of next week and resume on 9th January. There are other state vocational schools in Kalmar which could also be interested.

About bleeding time! The next step is to withdraw funding from any schools which teach religion as science - so perhaps you might be able to get rid of the Vardy academies!

Short answer: yes. I can't see any other way of reversing the decline in foreign language learning in the UK. The idea that resources are being diverted to younger learners seems a bit fanciful to me. The hard message I have to deliver on in-service training courses for primary school English teachers here in Sweden is that you need your best and most-qualified teachers to teach the beginners … but guess where those teachers usually end up (not in the primary sector …). So the idea that unqualified or poorly-qualified primary language teachers are going to instil a love of languages which is so strong that there'll be a resurge in demand for MFL at secondary level in about 5 years time seems strongly counter-intuitive to me.

Let me know what kind of secondary school participation you're interested in, and I'm sure we'll find someone. One potential partner which immediately springs to mind is a sixth-form college just down the road from my office called Calmare International School. They are a 'private' school, but in Sweden that means receiving the same grant per pupil as all the other schools, but having their own management. They make a big thing about vocational training, the use of ICT and language teaching (German, French, Italian, Spanish and Japanese, as well as English). They have a very well-developed system of vocational training, where pupils are assigned to specific people in various local companies for part of their course. If they were interested, it'd be quite convenient for us, since they're so close.

When I lived in Saudi Arabia during the last Gulf War but one, the Daewoo car company (General Motors) produced a cheap model specially for the Gulf market, called the Daewoo Racer (excellent name!). In their advertising, however, they made a classic blunder: "… the car has German styling and American engineering …" The other way round would have been better …

I work at university-level in Sweden, where I specialise in distance education, as well as in the application of ICT in the teaching-learning process. If an institution like ours is eligible, then I'm interested in taking part too.

Scotland Yard now say that it was Polonium 210 which killed him. The Guardian's latest report can be read here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,1956680,00.html

This is an article which has appeared in today's Times Higher Education Supplement (though you need to subscribe in order to read it). I'm one of the people being quoted - even though I'm no longer going to be going to Berlin. We were asked to speculate about what developments would be important in the future - I wonder what Forum members think. Meet the avatars, your new students Published: 24 November 2006 in The Times Higher Education Supplement On the eve of the Online Educa Berlin conference, The Times Higher asked delegates how IT will change the nature of academics' work in ten years' time. Academic lives will be changed for ever with the death of the ivory tower desktop and the advent of more mobile, ambient, wearable devices "plugged into" technical and social networks. Learning technologies will be more instant and accessible, reach more people and touch lives not previously "into" formal education. Knowledge construction and sharing will become more participative, complex, informal and learner-centred. Academics should become as comfortable in the virtual world as in the real world. Learning design will shift to accommodate mobility and participation, and students will need more structure and pacing by teachers. Universities should be building this capacity NOW! Gilly Salmon?Professor of e-learning and learning technologies, Leicester University ?? Academics are being overwhelmed by the amount of information and communication that now exists. If I were to spend a minute answering every (non-spam) e-mail I get, it would take me at least two hours each day.JWe need a more sophisticated mechanism for automated responses to e-mails. Meanwhile, browsing the wealth of relevant "published" material on a subject is becoming almost impossible. We therefore need sophisticated mechanisms for academic publications - going far beyond what Google is currently thinking of providing - to identify the most pertinent material for our research. I am also sure that with all the technology available for e-learning in ten years' time there will be a resurgence of interest in being "taught" by a real person. Training people to be quality "teachers"will be far more important than focusing on the technology they will be using. Tim Unwin ?Professor of geography and director of graduate studies, Royal Holloway, University of London People invest large amounts of time and energy playing video and online games with multiple participants. This presents a tantalising opportunity for education. As the need for lifelong learning becomes more manifest, so serious online games will grow increasingly important. Future generations will demand it. An example of a serious multi-user game is the Dutch virtual city of Sieberdam. Law students use it to prepare cases, social workers to orchestrate neighbourhood activities and young people to experiment with finding a job. The city consists of an interactive map, underlying Yellow Pages and pseudo websites for agencies, enterprises, associations, even individual citizens. It forms the common playground for a whole range of simulations. Teachers define roles, tasks and a work flow that determine which tasks should be available for which role at which point in time. Students then become participants in the simulation game, playing a role, assessing their options, making decisions and accepting the consequences. An example of a single-user game is similar to the flight simulator used in pilot training. Such games could be developed for all types of complex machinery, laboratory experiments and complex procedures. They offer students a cheap and safe way to learn. Pieter van der Hijden?Business information systems tutor, Amsterdam University of Professional Education The "personal learning environment" will have an enormous impact. This is not a single technology but rather a range of tools and practices that put the student at the centre of the learning process. The rise of social software such as blogs, wikis and, indeed, social networking sites such as Bebo and MySpace herald a sea change in the way we think about community, collaboration and knowledge sharing. Built on what have been called Web 2.0 technologies, this new architecture of participation will continue to blur the boundaries between formal and informal learning spaces. There will be a shift from text and towards other media such as audio and video. The semantic web, in which content is navigated through user-generated tags and categories that add meaning and content, has yet to have its day. Academics will be pressured to adapt their practice by a new generation of learners capable of choosing and harnessing their own technologies for study. These personal learning environments will render traditional "virtual learning environments" mere repositories for content and assessment, and will force academics and institutions to respond rapidly and responsibly to these changes if they are to continue to engage adequately with their student body. Steven Warburton?E-learning and ICT manager, King's College London 3G telephony is going to change the lives of academics. In Sweden, young people already use it and have, for example, Microsoft Messenger on their phones. I'm giving a bunch of students advice about postmodernist literary criticism via Messenger as I write this.It's likely that some of them are contacting me via their phones. Students could "buy" the exact components of whatever course they want, regardless of where in the world these components are being offered. I run an online business-writing course, and my students, who are from all over Sweden and the world, spend most time in one-to-one contact with an internet tutor - be it Beth in Auckland, Bruce in Brisbane or Jon in Valladolid. The idea of students spending their days in university buildings, sitting in rows and experiencing "Dick Turpin" pedagogy ("stand and deliver") is on the way out. Academics are going to be working with their students much more on a one-to-one basis, rather than seeing them as a mass of people in a lecture hall. In one sense, we'll be going back to an ancient way of working, rather like Socrates meeting people in the agora in Athens - students and teachers will engage in that kind of Socratic dialogue on a much more casual basis than today, as and when the questions occur. I envisage this going further, with link-ups between 3G telephony and virtual environments, such as Second Life, liberating students from their computers, so they can, for example, steer their avatars through Birmingham in the 1980s on their mobile phones from home as they participate with me in exercises on David Lodge's Nice Work. This will all involve quite a radical change in our working environments: we will all have to learn to organise our thoughts, and ration access to ourselves so we don't become overwhelmed with information and inputs. David Richardson?Lecturer in English, Kalmar University, Sweden A changing demographic profile will result in a student population that involves more "earning and learning". Such students will therefore require flexible delivery methods. New initiatives will focus on the use of appropriate personalised mobile technologies, enabling students to have greater control over when they want to learn and a wider choice of learning experience through a blend of teaching approaches. This market-led development will have a dramatic impact on the lives of academics, requiring the use of different teaching styles and appropriate information management using modern technologies. From a university perspective, it presents the challenge of providing a responsive learning interface with students while supporting staff as they learn about and adapt to using new approaches to teaching. Jo Smedley?Assistant director of combined honours, Aston University New plagiarism control tools will have an impact as we receive our students' assignments electronically. The growth of databases of such work will make it easy for lecturers to check for cheating and students will find it increasingly difficult to plagiarise. It will be easier to obtain better marks by using sources in a positive and constructive way. Tone Vold?Assistant professor, Hedmark University College, Norway Computer processing speeds will continue to improve, network bandwidth will grow, fast computers will get smaller and so on. At the same time, everything will get cheaper. It's also possible that these benefits will be accompanied by a ubiquitous "smartness" in networked systems capable of deducing our patterns of behaviour and hence anticipating our needs. Artificial intelligence may appear simply as improved search engines or, perhaps more interestingly, in things such as expert chatbots that can hold conversations online. Such developments would step up the challenge to the authority of teaching institutions that all computing technology represents. However, the significant and predictable problem for universities will be to keep up with the pace of technological change in general. We are likely to reach a time quite soon when it makes no sense for a university to duplicate commercially available IT services, such as websites, e-mail accounts and intranets. All can be bought for a fraction of what it now costs universities and almost all are more robust and better maintained. There's bound to be resistance, but eventually even university management teams will see that having IT departments in their current form is an anachronism and a waste of resources. David Rowsell?Senior research fellow, IT research and development unit, University of the Arts, London From the perspective of learning and teaching technology, the main driver will be the knowledge, expertise and expectations of students. They will have extreme expectations with regard to the availability, personalisation and the collaborative features of the content they use. This will be enforced by hardware advances that, compared with today, will provide processors with 1,000 times greater processing power and 100 times greater storage capacity, and portable devices with A3 roll-up screens and virtual keyboards, integrated voice/video wireless streaming and always-on access to the web. Academics will not create content. Instead, they will identify high-quality trusted sources that their students will use. The key skill students will have to develop is how to identify and manipulate quality information and learning materials from unlimited access to data. Elizabeth Rogerson?Head, Distance Learning Centre (Nursing and Palliative Care), and Colin Smythe Dundee University Miniaturisation will converge with developments in nanotechnology and three-dimensional subatomic computing to produce fully interactive, personalised virtual learning environments. The resultant effect on universities will be to hasten a re-evaluation ofJthe relationship between physical space and learning space, and the recognition of learning as an individual, internalised process, both in cognitive and in physical terms. The effect on the academic is going to be traumatic, to say the least. The biggest challenge facing university staff development departments is going to be to prepare academics for a world of work in which constant, radical change is an inherent characteristic of day-to-day life. Whether universities in their present form will be able to adapt to a situation where most learning takes place elsewhere, often under the auspices of maximally flexible flat-structured organisations, is another question altogether. Herbert Thomas?Head of e-learning, the Centre for Higher Education Studies and Development, the University of the Free State, South Africa ? ?Online Educa Berlin, the 12th International Conference on Technology-Supported Learning and Training, will be held in Berlin between November 29 and December 1. ?Website: www.online-educa.com

It looks like I'll be including Moodle in the package of course materials in the spring. I'm attracted to the idea of being able to upload podcasts easily, and we're using a plug-in called Gong, which allows for audio inputs to a discussion forum. If I can think of a good way it can be used, I'll use that too. If you want to take a look at the skeleton course I've put together so far (no time …), you can go to http://moodle.hbv.hik.se and take a look at the course called English 1-10p, a1 Spring Term 2007. There's a guest access and the key is ENG107. I'm still no fan of LMSs, but I'm adding Moodle to the repertoire this spring as an experiment, to see if Moodle can be used in collaboration with all the other teacher and student inputs on the course. BTW, we're hosting an interesting talk in a couple of weeks time about what comes after LMSs. Here's the blurb: Nästa föreläsning: 29 nov Thinking beyond the LMS Michael Hotrum (University of Alberta, Canada) talks about communities and ideas about the future of LMSs Time: 16.30-18.00 (Central European Time - one hour ahead of UK time) Place: Högskolan i Kalmar, Distance Studio, Library and Marratech (http://artemis.hik.se:8080 in the virtual room ”Chico”). Societal needs are changing, education is evolving and student needs are changing. But the architecture and pedagogy of the LMS - the traditional distance education technology - is still confined to the paradigm of the electronic classroom. This session will examine where we are, propose where we should be as providers of distance education, and suggest how the LMS must change. We will identify the opportunities afforded by educational social software, how it can be used to expand the pedagogy of the LMS, and how it is now being used to design and deliver learning outside the walls of the traditional classroom paradigm. Visit Michaels blog at http://choicelearning.blogspot.com ------- Marratech is a desktop video conference system. In order to participate, you'll need to download the client software from http://www.marratech.com

I think it's also important to see the Soviets as primarily Russians. I think that it's fair to say that Stalin had abandoned a political approach which was based on political principles and theories a long time before WW2 (if, in fact, you feel that he'd *ever* looked at power that way). Russia's principal problem, since the country emerged from the Middle Ages has been the lack of warm-water ports. The routes to the west go through Öresund, Skaggerak and Kattegut. The routes to the south-west not only have to pass through the middle of Istanbul, but also pass through the Dardanelles a day or so later. Vladivostok is the only 'open seas' port … and that's a long, long way from Moscow. St Petersburg itself was built on the site of a forward Swedish military settlement, designed to hem the Russians in, and Russia suffered invasion after invasion from the west, which resulted in tremendous loss of life and destruction of property. Napoleon's was just one of them … Even Narva, which the Swedes lost in 1709, could very easily have gone the other way, and the Swedes wouldn't have been merciful if they'd won. Basically, just about every time a western power had an army on Russia's border, the result was invasion. In this context, I can understand Stalin's desire to have a couple of hundred kilometres between Russia and the next set of hostile western forces.

Now that we've got environments like Second Life, I wonder if there's any mileage in putting on cyber theatre there for educational purposes. (I'm dead certain someone's already tried it, by the way). If anyone gets interested, I could put you in touch with our Drama department, who could probably be encouraged to take part. We've got an application for funding in with the Norwegian government's 'Future Fund' (where they put their oil revenues for the benefit of future generations, rather than going on a spending spree now) to set up an educational environment in Second Life for the use of three partner universities, in Norway, Sweden and Missouri. This first time round, we've got a particular post-graduate course in mind, but once the environment's there, it could be used for other things too. We'll get a decision in December …

Isn't it interesting the way that people who are rhetorically all in favour of 'freedom' turn out to be so controlling and censorious, when faced with freedom in practice …

We'll know tomorrow, won't we, John! I'm deliberately avoiding most of the commentaries on the US elections until the result has been announced, but it'll be interesting to see whether the turkeys keep voting for Christmas!

I use all sorts of on-line systems to help students understand what we're doing on a course. However, I don't rely on 'pure' on-line tests in the sense you're probably meaning (i.e. with both questions and answers on-line, and with some kind of automatic reporting of marks). Unless the exercise is designed for student self-help, there's always a trained teacher involved in making the assessments. My main problem with on-line tests in the form that they usually exist nowadays is that the information you get from them is either banal or wrong … and they encourage students to be answer-oriented, when I think that learning is process-oriented. Educational administrators usually love them because they generate numerical information … but that kind of information is usually pedagogical nonsense. To give you one example, in Sweden, when you learn English, you'll come across a 'some and any' question in most on-line grammar tests. To test them, I always look for the question that says something like: Would you like *** tea? and the one which says: I don't like *** of them. (*** = either 'some' or 'any'). The pre-programmed answer is 'any for both of these … but any native speaker can tell you that either is equally acceptable - provided you specify the context. In fact, 'would you like some tea?' is actually much more likely to heard by a Swedish learner of English. I often hear an argument which says "well, OK, they're flawed, but aren't they something to use whilst we wait for something better to be produced?". I'd say, no. It's better to put your efforts into more meaningful activities … but these almost always involve trained and experienced teachers, people who are rarely involved in the production of on-line tests. You're welcome to take a look at my Toolbox page, where I've collected together some of the on-line 'tests' I use with my students: http://www.humsam.hik.se/distans/existstud/toolbox.htm

One of the revelations I had as a Brit coming to Sweden was that a high standard of living, a high degree of equality, a good welfare state, etc, etc aren't the *end* of a political discussion, but rather just the beginning. It's very difficult to find a space in your life to even think about how your country is being governed if you're having to scrape to get by, or to take two or three jobs just to make ends meet. It's no accident that the first thing parties of the right want to do when they gain power is to create an underclass of the working poor, so that the broad mass of people are going to be too busy wondering how they're going to pay their bills at the end of the month to want to ask awkward questions. It reminds me of the stories my grandad and uncles used to tell of life in Sheffield (England) during the Great Depression, when they often had no money at all in the house. The rentman used to come round with his leather money bag every week, and they'd put one penny a week by for private health insurance. When my Uncle Joe caught diphtheria, they used up all their insurance on medical care for him, and then were terrified that one of the other three boys would get it. If they had, they wouldn't have been able to call the doctor … No wonder Churchill lost the 1945 General Election. The problem about being so ignorant about history and the world around you is that your ignorance comes back to bite you in the bum. I worked in Angola in mid-1985 when the Cubans were still there (and they were incredibly popular with the Angolans, BTW). Even though Angola was a war-ravaged country, it was in a better shape than parts of Savannah, just a couple of hundred yards from the waterfront, where I'd been a couple of years before … Let's just hope for all our sakes that Americans manage to get a grip on their own future on November 7th … though I agree with Peter that the chances aren't great.

Thanks for those kind words, Daniel. I usually take a deep breath before I express opinions about how the US system works to Americans! I'm quite prepared to stand corrected by people who know better than I do. One image I use to explain US politics to Swedes is a 'red shift' (bearing in mind, as I'm sure you know, that red is the colour of the *left* in Europe, whilst blue is the colour of the right). Any party in Europe which calls itself 'liberal' is a party of the right. The liberal parties (such as the Liberals in the UK, the FDP in Germany and Venstre in Denmark) originated before universal suffrage, and were, for a time, the vehicles by which working people had their views represented in Parliament (since working people didn't own enough property to qualify for the vote). The Swedish liberal party is even called 'Folkpartiet' - the People's Party. In Swedish politics, you divide the blocs up into 'bourgeois' and 'non-bourgeois', with the old Communist Party and the Social Democrats in the latter bloc and all the others (except the Greens, who feel that they don't belong in either bloc) in the former. The US Democratic Party is definitely in the bourgeois bloc … which means that you don't have a 'non-bourgeois' bloc at all. The Swedish situation is mirrored right across Europe, even though there's a good case for saying that the 'non-bourgeois' parties have sold out. There's a constant battle going on, though, with plenty of interference from the US.

When I'm trying to teach Swedes about how the US Constitution operates, one of the factors which needs a lot of explaining is gerrymandering. Another 'hard sell' is the positive aspects both of the US Constitution and US society in general … My take on each of these issues is to try to point out the politics in the US and politics in Europe are still not quite the same - the US has no left-wing parties to speak of, which means that US voters don't have much of an alternative view of society presented to them (at least at the level of political parties - local races are another thing altogether). I usually ask them why demonstrators in the US often walk around in circles, rather than standing still. (It's a way of avoiding a notorious piece of anti-union legislation from the early 20th century.) This strikes a chord - all over Sweden you'll find 'Folkets hus' and 'Folkets park' (literally "The People's House" and "The People's Park"!), which were started by left-wingers and trade unionists who had to build their own meeting places at the dawn of representative democracy, because the local land-owners, industrialists and priests usually conspired to try to deny the freedom of association. However, at a crucial stage in the 1920s and 1930s, Swedes won battles which Americans lost … which is why Swedish democracy doesn't function in the same way as US democracy (gerrymandering is an impossibility here, for example), and why you don't ever see attack ads in the Swedish media.

I've always found it interesting that the Thatcher government has had such an easy ride when it comes to investigations of corruption. I lived in Saudi Arabia at the time of the invasion of Kuwait, and it was remarkable how relatively silent Thatcher was about Saddam Hussein at the time, compared with how strident she was about other acts of aggression (such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). I remember quite well the contempt various British government officials had for the Observer journalist who was executed by Saddam Hussein (in 1989?). It made you wonder if there was some connection between Hussein's regime and Thatcher (arm sales were an obvious link). When the solids hit the air-conditioning in 1990, it quickly became clear to Brits living in Saudi that they'd get little help from British officials. A friend of mine with joint British and New Zealand citizenship phoned the New Zealand embassy in Riyadh to enquire about evacuation plans, and asked if they were coordinating their efforts with the UK. The response was immediate: "No way!" This just about sums things up …

I just looked up 'offentlighetsprincipen' in the Swedish version of Wikipedia (http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offentlighetsprincipen for those of you who can read Swedish!). Basically, you can get a copy of just about any public document within a reasonable amount of time on request in Sweden. 'Public document' is quite widely defined, and covers notes held on public officials' computers … You can request access to documents without revealing your identity and have copies sent to you by post. This is a right which dates back to 1766/1792 (King Gustav III abolished it, but it was reintroduced), and it's a constitutional right in Sweden. A related constitutional right is protection of 'whistleblowers'. It's an offence to even try to uncover the identity of someone who gives journalists or others information here and various politicians have been brought to trial over the years for this. If we can do it here, then the objections must be political rather than practical in the UK.

Those are very heartening words, Norman. I must admit that I was being a bit provocative - I've met several very professional History teachers in my contacts with E-HELP, for example. One of the fundamental issues for me as a university teacher is my younger students' lack of context. I still remember a brilliant History lesson from school about the Vietnam war, which brought out the historical rivalries between Thais, Vietnamese and Chinese which have been being fought out in Indo-China for the past thousand years. This is not the whole of the story of the Vietnam War, but it must be a very important factor to take into account. I've experienced similar phenomena myself when trying to explain to people that both Osama bin Laden and Ho Chi Minh were once US allies, and were both supplied and had their fighters trained by the US. It's very difficult for people who know little about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the resistance to Japanese occupation of Vietnam to understand the events that came next.

I studied Philosophy and Politics at Warwick in the mid 1970s, and I remember that a great deal of the degree programme actually dealt with how you assess evidence for various claims (concerning both Philosophy and Politics). When I talk to experts in other disciplines, particularly in History and Literature, I'm struck by how unconcerned they seem to be about examining the bases on which their disciplines rest. History teachers in particular seem to be very good at examining evidence on a 'micro-level', but very sloppy about looking at the big picture. I.e. there can be lots of discussion about the authenticity of this document or that, but people just accept statements like "The Industrial Revolution happened because coal, iron ore, water power and cheap labour were available". But maybe I'm just ignorant and prejudiced …

This is exactly what many European governments are tempted to do ("let's put the 'great' back in Great Britain"). Strangely enough, it's usually governments of the right who're most tempted to 'rewrite history' to make it the history of great men (usually) who 'made this country what it is' …