David Richardson

It depends what you mean by 'socialist governments'. However, let's assume that Sweden's Social Democratic government fits the US description (not a very dangerous assumption!). There's an election campaign going on at the moment, so this is a very hot topic here in Sweden, but the description of Swedes as being dependent on their welfare state has been losing a lot of its sting recently, since there are more and more issues on which a lack of government action has been criticised heavily. There was a storm in January last year, for example, which caused widespread havoc in the south of Sweden. The forests it destroyed were largely in private hands, and you didn't hear anyone arguing against the prompt and effective central government response. When the tsunami hit, on the other hand, it was on Boxing Day, early in the morning, here, and there's been a chorus of criticism (often coming from right-wing conservatives) about how terrible it was that the 'government' didn't spring into action and rescue Swedes stuck up trees on the other side of the world. It's difficult to have an objective discussion about the issue, since the goalposts keep being moved. However, one abiding principle of Sweden's Social Democrats (who've been in power for most of the period since 1932) has been that the state levels the playing field, but private companies have to make the running (with state help, of course). In Stockholm, for example, one of the largest private bus companies is called Wedins. There aren't many Stockholmers who know that that company started in a shed beside the main road way up in the deprived north. The government enticed the local bus companies up there to work together to provide a daily bus service to the capital (with generous subsidies, etc), and Werner Wedins was one of them. They weren't big enough to run a bus every day, but they didn't have to, since there were a load of other companies working together. That provided the company with enough regular business for it to be able to expand, and they bought up local bus companies in the capital, and haven't looked back. There's actually a very high level of entrepreneurship in Sweden (though the Swedish right haven't really noticed this), and there seems to be some evidence that generous social welfare payments have helped in this. The personal consequence of failure is less sharp, so people dare to take chances. There are plenty of 'start-up' courses, so if you do start your own business, it's very difficult *not* to have been trained in basic book-keeping, marketing, etc. If you're unemployed, and if the bureaucrats judge that you've got a viable business idea, you'll get a living costs subsidy for, I think, the first 6 months of trading to help you get on your feet. I remember too when Volvo were considering setting up a factory in Uddevalla (outside Gothenburg) in the mid-1980s. The state built them a motorway and provided a load of other infrastructural help. When some more traditional businessmen and political opponents complained about this, the Industry Minister turned to the cameras and said, "If any of you want to set up a factory in a depressed area which will provide hundreds of jobs, just come to my office, and we'll set you up with a similar deal." So, by my reading, there's a contradictory picture been painted of Sweden. It's got the reputation of being a high-tax, high-bureaucracy country with high state involvement in everything, with many people on the political right. If you look, though, at what an organisation like the OECD says about the country, you get a picture of a highly-adaptable place, where entrepreneurship is high and corporate taxes, in particular, are actually very low. The OECD sees Sweden as being one of the best places to do business in Europe, and the Swedish economy is back up in the top 5 or so. When you consider that Sweden was an economic basket case just a couple of generations ago (lost 25% of its population to emigration between 1880 and 1920, with the general difficulty of putting food on the table being a significant factor in that emigration), this is actually an incredible performance. Turkey was neutral during WW2 too, and I can't really see any reason why Sweden has been so successful (whilst Turkey has been relatively unsuccessful) apart from the policies Swedish governments have followed. Sweden might have been lucky, but it managed to use its luck in order to create lasting benefits for its population. In comparison with the United States, we have one great advantage: health-care costs are borne collectively, which means that the provision of medical services is extremely efficient here (measured in terms of the amount of money which is spent on actual medical care, compared with administration). There's a very high degree of consensus in Sweden about what a good society looks like. People here would prefer to pay relatively high taxes, and organise most services collectively, than to have a low-tax, low-service economy. For most of those years of Social Democratic control in the past, parliament sat for a three-year term, so the Swedish voters got plenty of opportunities to disagree with the way their society has been set up. OK, that's my take on it - it'll be interesting to read what other people think.

I'm not a historian, but I have a story to contribute to the Haig discussion. When I was teaching in Dartford, every November there'd be someone coming round to sell poppies (small paper and plastic flowers sold to raise money for veterans on the occasion of Armistice Day, November 11 - for the benefit of any non-UK readers). I never bought one or wore one, and the pupils would always ask why. I'd tell them to come in their time (i.e. the break), rather than taking up my lesson time, and some of them always would. I'd point out the words 'Haig Fund' in the middle of the poppy and give them my interpretation of what happened in World War 1 (my grandad was in the Royal Enniskillen Fusiliers, an Irish regiment which - completely coincidentally - found itself in the front line of just about every major battle in World War 1, starting with Gallipoli). I'd also tell them that veterans ought to be helped out of general taxation, rather than having to rely on charity, since they were wounded in the service of society as a whole (at least ostensibly). Making their aid into a charitable event both helps to conceal a lot of truths about how and why they were hurt, and helps society as a whole evade its responsibility for actions and decisions governments take. In three years I never had any trouble at all either getting my pupils to understand what I was talking about, or avoiding any allegations that I was behaving unethically as a teacher (there weren't any allegations like that at all, actually).

I can understand your reluctance, Andy. However, one of the useful features of team blogging in the context I work in is that you can start them and then leave them very quickly and easily. We have, for example, new groups starting the collaboration between Missouri and Kalmar each term and its very handy to be able to create something unique for each group, and then abandon it when that term's collaboration is over. There's something else we've noticed about team blogs, compared with forums (which we also use here): students seem to post more and oftener on blogs than on discussion forums. I'm not sure quite why this is, but I suspect that it has something to do with the look and feel of a team blog, compared with a discussion forum. Our teacher training department uses a forum with almost the same look and feel as this one, and they don't seem to get the same degree of commitment from their students that we get from ours … but, of course, this may be due to other factors. We've had another problem with forums, that doesn't seem to affect team blogs: the taking over of the forum to spread all sorts of unpleasant spam. This is a problem which hit us during the autumn, and the legal repercussions are still going on. We could get round this by using our VLE, but, unfortunately, the way that's been set up causes lots of problems for a distance teacher (mostly because the only sure way of getting a password to access it is to turn up at an office in Kalmar itself). The look and feel of the VLE forum is also terribly boring … and, as I've said, that seems to be an important factor in participation.

Yes, Andy, that's fine. Thanks for the service! I just assumed that the TES forum wasn't taking posts from foreign e-mail addresses.

I just tried posting a comment on the TES forum without success (nothing happened when I clicked on the Post button). Here's what I tried to say: I'm currently a teacher-trainer in Sweden, where class-based education doesn't officially exist. Basically, you go to your local school, and a lot of effort (and money) is invested in making sure that all the local schools are more or less at the same standard. Class rears its ugly head, of course. There are schools with high proportions of middle-class parents and ones with low proportions, mainly because of geography. However, it's interesting to see how few distortions due to class there are in a society which actively tries to achieve equality of provision. One of the best schools in the city I live in is the one with the 'worst' catchment area. They know they've potentially got problems, and they use the resources they've been provided with to try to deal with them. Sweden doesn't have league tables - and it doesn't even have examinations. Pupils aren't given grades at all until they're in the last but one year of secondary school. And yet, Swedish pupils consistently score very high in international comparisons. The measure I use is to ask people to look around at the society they've created: the standard of living is very high - and evenly high; the level of social tension is very low; and, strangely enough, despite what's seen as a high level of taxation, it's a very good country to start a business in. International comparisons aren't always fruitful, but sometimes they can help you to work out what are necessary conditions for success and what aren't. Sweden's relative success as a country (remember that it was only a couple of generations ago that Sweden lost a quarter of its population to economic migration) seems to me to show that the kind of artificial, class-based discrimination in education which is practised in parts of the UK certainly isn't a necessary condition for a successful society.

A cheap and cheerful way of using 'forums' is to use a team blog. This means that the person creating the blog has administrative privileges, and invites the pupils/students to the blog as contributors. If you're a member, you can post, but anyone can access the blog and read it. Sometimes blog contributions are part of students' portfolios; sometimes they're places where students post send-in tasks; and sometimes they're forums for interaction on a more general level between students (often in different countries). I use Blogger (Google's service at http://www.blogger.com). Here are a couple of current team blogs: http://bwvt06.blogspot.com/ http://teyc06.blogspot.com/ (a lot of this last one is in Swedish, but there are some posts in English)

How did it go?

I too don't see that Ed and I are at opposite poles in a discussion - we're just working in different contexts. One of the problems I've seen manifest itself time and again in Sweden is that the introduction of a VLE (almost exclusively by IT technicians) is often the *only* development in ICT-based learning in a particular organisation. Teachers sometimes have (or make) the time to change the way they work to take advantage of the particular features of their VLE, but most often the whole experience is such a pain that it turns them away from ICT-based learning altogether. Technology should be like a cat (to quote a leading Canadian e-learning expert) - beautiful, comfortable and able to achieve amazing things with little apparent effort (!). OK, I'm a cat person myself! If your VLE is like this, then you're ahead of the game. When teachers have been able to get their VLEs to work, they've almost always spent lots of time discussing teaching and learning - call it 'pedagogics', if you like - *before* they've turned their attention to the technology. An organisation which used to be called 'Statens Skola för Vuxna i Härnösand' was one of the pioneering organisations in this. They went through several commercially-available VLEs, and even commissioned one of Sweden's leading computer consultancy firms to create one for them (guess what a waste of money that was!), but they kept on getting nowhere. In the end, it was one of their teachers of Spanish who broke the logjam. She was a very traditional teacher, for whom typewriters were the limit of her interest in technology. She happened to share an office with an English teacher who had a very gentle approach to technology (not me, by the way), and together they created a wonderful resource for the learning of Spanish (only available internally, unfortunately). The main interface is a tree, covered with leaves, where different branches, twigs, knotholes, etc, take you to different parts of the course. Each time you log on, something different happens (such as a squirrel dashing out and dropping a nut which turns into the latest news). They did this with their 'web warrior' organisation, which is, in effect, a parallel organisation of IT pedagogues, who work together with, but not in the same sub-organisation as, the IT technicians responsible for operation and maintenance of the system. The web warriors are programmers, graphic designers and animators who are available to talk to teachers and to guide their vague thoughts into achievable IT projects. It costs money, of course, but not as much as you'd think. What actually happens is that the organisation spends its money much more efficiently, since the projects that they invest in have a very good track record of turning into viable ICT-based courses (some of which bring in lots of external funds). The really interesting thing for me was the speed with which teachers started using ICT in their courses, once they'd got a 'metaphor' which worked for them. As long as the technology looked like the catalog tree in Windows, it just put them off, to such an extent that they found it impossible to even understand what was there. As soon as they had a handle to grasp, they started making the VLE really work. Nowadays they're called the Swedish Agency for Flexible Learning (http://www.cfl.se). You'll get a rough idea of what they do by clicking the In English link, but, unfortunately, most of the good stuff is only in Swedish. 'Kursnavet', for example, is a brilliant tool for sharing IT-based course materials … but you have to be able to understand Swedish in order to be able to use it.

Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer, deserves to be. - David Thornburg Teachers are people who talk in other people's sleep. (Apocryphal)

I'm sorry if it came across that way. In my experience (both as a user and aide to designers of various VLEs), the experience of straying into the 'Administration' area of the VLE is quite terrifying for most teachers. It doesn't need to be this way, but I think that it's best for an inexperienced teacher to hear that it isn't them being stupid - it's the VLE being badly designed. The aim of my point 2 was more to try to isolate what the actual functions of a VLE are, so that the inexperienced teacher can ask the IT technician what their particular VLE calls each of those functions and how it works. I'm not totally negative towards VLEs - you've got to start somewhere - but the results are most often 'type 1' courses (which we call 'bok på burk' - or book in a box - in Swedish).

A few of my thoughts about VLEs: 1. Many VLEs have been created for a corporate market (that, interestingly, hardly exists - it's a really existential situation that). Thus they tend to have plenty of tools for monitoring individuals who use the system, which is a feature many teachers find less useful. Another consequence of this is that their 'default' systems for creating tests tend to be rather primitive pedagogically (lots of emphasis on multiple-choice, for example). The look-and-feel of many VLEs tends to be rather old-fashioned, too. My explanation for this is that producers of VLEs tend to put lots of resources into the programming and almost none into pedagogics. The end result is about what you'd expect from amateur teachers: programmed learning! 2. It's often the case that the 'admin' tools are difficult to get your head around (I remember one that I was engaged to help develop had pages where you had to start from the bottom and work your way back to the top in order to create course pages!). However, there are some basic principles to bear in mind: You're going to have to create users … put them into classes … create course materials … and then connect course materials up to classes. Bear in mind, though, that what I've just written is a very 'teacher-oriented' way of looking at VLEs (we tend to see pupils first and course materials later). Many VLEs will force you to create the course materials first or the classes first before you can start creating users. Sometimes you have to create the course materials in their entirety and you can't amend them later. The bottom line is that if you don't seem to be able to do what seems to you to be useful and logical, don't give up. It's just a question of getting your head round the logic and perception of usefulness of the programmers who created the VLE. 3. I've always found VLEs to be very useful when talking to publishers about the use of copyrighted materials. The fact that you can control who accesses copyrighted materials, and restrict access to your own organisation (if we ignore hackers) seems to reassure many copyright-owners. With VLE-use, as with all other aspects of ICT-based educational materials, my strong advice is to get permission from copyright owners before you use copyrighted materials … and be absolutely certain to gain permission to use pictures - those copyright owners tend to be much more aware of how they want their materials used and not used than owners of printed or text-based materials. (Did you know, for example, that you'll never get permission to use any Calvin and Hobbes cartoons in schools, even if you print them on paper? The author is very sensitive about how his creations are used … which is why there isn't any merchandise for Calvin and Hobbes). 4. Separate the administrative aspects of VLE use and development from the IT-based aspects, and let specialists in each area into your development works as a teacher. It's very common for the VLE to be the domain of the IT department … which is fine for some aspects of their use … but when it comes to creating users, it's a real pain, since IT technicians tend not to have administrative skills, so they create systems for the creation and deletion of users which are very hard to put into practice in the real world. You have to have a trade-off between accessibility and security, otherwise there's no point acquiring a VLE in the first place (i.e. it doesn't matter what features a VLE has if no-one can actually get into it). It's a great idea to have a 'lurker' ID, which you can give to casual visitors. Many VLEs have quite sophisticated features for giving users access to particular materials for specified periods of time. This is exactly the kind of feature which appeals to IT technicians … but make sure that it's the professional administrators who have the final say. Let's say you've got a system whereby a teacher specifies the first and last days of a course so that the materials can be put on to the VLE. The trick is to leave yourself plenty of margin, for those pupils who were ill, moved house or school, etc, etc. You can be certain that there'll always be someone who missed the exam, and it can be a real pain re-activating a course after it's been automatically deleted at a certain cut-off date. Make sure that the IT department check basic stuff, like the date and time settings on their server. (We've been being cut-off 5 minutes early by our video conference bridge for two whole years … and we just discovered that their server clock has been running 10 minutes fast!). Hope this is useful …

I've just picked up the February Newsletter from the day nursery our little one goes to and it had the following passage in it, which is typical of the Swedish school system: "We have now built four project groups within the Vasa school network (comprising 3 different units which handle education for children from the age of 12 months up to the age of 16). These groups will work on individual development plans, the development of reading and language, socio-emotional training and participation/pupil democracy. The aim is to write a common statement of goals in these areas for all the schools in the network." There are networks like these all over the place, and it ought to be fairly easy to include inputs from the discussions which lead to established policies in a special project for the Citizenship project.

OK, perhaps 'pro-Israeli' is the wrong term. My plea, really, is to return the adjective 'Jewish' to the meaning of 'pertaining to Judaism' - in other words, a meaning relating to a specific religion - just as Catholic relates principally to the Roman Catholic faith, and Islamic refers to the Muslim faith. The problem with a term which slips from the religious to the political and back again is that you can't pin down what the people using it are actually talking about at any given moment … which is where the 'criticism of Israel = anti-semitism" argument comes in. I understand that this suits the supporters of the various pressure groups with 'Jewish' in their names, but why should the rest of us accept it?

I'm glad that this Forum is spared the equation of criticism of the government of Israel and anti-semitism, but Mark has a very good point. Perhaps we all need to be very careful about the terminology we use. For example, if this thread had started "Pro-Israeli Pressure Groups …" then much of the debate in it would have lost a lot of its point. For my own part, I have no problem separating my attitude to Islam from my attitude to the government of Saudi Arabia; my attitude to Roman Catholicism from the Italian government; and my attitude towards Judaism from my attitude to the government of the State of Israel.

Did you hear the terrible news? The Coca-Cola Company are threatening to withdraw their vending machines from UK schools: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4771676.stm It rather puts the spotlight on the sponsorship schools receive for allowing unhealthy drinks and snacks to be purveyed on their premises, doesn't it.

I would hope so … but in 1974, Congress had a very different make-up. I wonder if the current bunch of party apparatchiks on the Republican benches would ever leave their sinking ship … and if the Democrats would ever find the backbone to really start opposing Bush's lot.

There's really not a lot of catching up to do! I'm not really that clever with computers and such. If you'd like to take a look at a site with podcasts on it, you could try going to: http://www.humsam.hik.se/distans/convcomp/convcompstart.htm Click on the icon in the middle of the page, and you'll arrive at the site for the collaboration between a university in Missouri and ourselves. You can either subscribe to these podcasts (via, say, iTunes), or listen to them directly on the page. We recorded these ones by linking up three teachers in different places (myself and two teachers in Warrensburg, Missouri) using Gizmo, which is one of these 'telephones on Internet' programmes. The quality is not quite as good as it would be if we were in a studio, but it's quite acceptable (listen to our second podcast, where we actually tested the sound levels in advance!). Imagine a round table discussion between members of the project about pedagogical matters relating to course development once a month or so.

Here's the post I put out on the Developing a Citizenship Course sub-forum: John's asked me about any special projects Kalmar could be involved in. Here's one idea: Swedish schools are very active when it comes to democratic participation in decision-making - at all levels of the system. The first parents' evening at our little daughter's day nursery took up, for example, the question of how exactly we can organise ourselves so that 18-month old babies have a say in the way the day nursery is organised! As soon as the children start school (at the age of 7), each class elects a 'Class Council', and also representatives to the 'School Council'. There are parental representatives on all governing bodies, from day nursery right through to sixth-form college too. What about a documentary film about this system from Sweden? It would be a relatively easy matter to interview various people involved in this, including the local politicians on the Education Committee of the local council (education's run locally in Sweden). It could also be interesting to film a couple of meetings of Class Councils and School Councils at various levels to hear what actually goes on at them. There's a value in these for Swedish pupils - at least to have something to compare the practice in their particular school with. They could also be an interesting input from the Project web site for teachers and pupils in other European countries too.

Podcasting is something we could use on the Citizenship Project, both as a way of keeping ourselves informed of developments as we go along, and then later, as we move into Phase 3 as a model for teachers of citizenship of how they could use ICT in their work. I won't go into the technical details here, save to say that they must be surmountable, because I've surmounted them (and I'm far from technical)! Using Gizmo to make recordings of multi-party conversations is something we've just started doing, and you can imagine the usefulness of that in making discussions of pan-European practice available to everyone. Podcasting involves pushing broadcasts to listeners, rather than just making sound files available on a web site (which is another use of ICT that we should definitely employ, in my opinion). That makes podcasting inherently dynamic, which could be a really useful feature if, for example, you've got a situation where pupils from several European schools are working on a longer-term project and want to make the latest situation available to everyone very quickly. There's been a discussion of podcasting on other parts of this Forum (use 'podcasting' as a search term and you'll find the discussions). What do you all think of it as a practice for the Citizenship project?

Sorry this thought has come in so late, but I've been incredibly busy these last two weeks. What about an .mp3 player with a record function, + a good microphone each? There are two uses which spring to mind immediately: 1) the possibility of having some of the inputs on the web site as sound files (interviews with key actors in a particular field, for example); and 2) podcasting. I'm just going to write a quick note on the 'Developing a Citizenship Course' about podcasting, so you can see the sort of thing I'm thinking of. We use two different types of .mp3 player here: a simple one with flash memory costs up to €50 and a higher-quality one with an internal hard disk costs around €250. I'm not sure what microphones cost, but it's not much. I have a colleague who uses one of the latter in his research and it's absolutely invaluable for recording interviews in the field which are then distributed to the rest of the research team.

John's asked me about any special projects Kalmar could be involved in. Here's one idea: Swedish schools are very active when it comes to democratic participation in decision-making - at all levels of the system. The first parents' evening at our little daughter's day nursery took up, for example, the question of how exactly we can organise ourselves so that 18-month old babies have a say in the way the day nursery is organised! As soon as the children start school (at the age of 7), each class elects a 'Class Council', and also representatives to the 'School Council'. There are parental representatives on all governing bodies, from day nursery right through to sixth-form college too. What about a documentary film about this system from Sweden? It would be a relatively easy matter to interview various people involved in this, including the local politicians on the Education Committee of the local council (education's run locally in Sweden). It could also be interesting to film a couple of meetings of Class Councils and School Councils at various levels to hear what actually goes on at them. There's a value in these for Swedish pupils - at least to have something to compare the practice in their particular school with. They could also be an interesting input from the Project web site for teachers and pupils in other European countries too.

"There are lies, damned lies, and statistics" The problem about comparing one economy with another (even if it's the OECD that's doing it) is that you're almost never comparing like with like. The same goes for when you're comparing one period in the economic life of a country with another from the same country. In my view, it ultimately comes down to political choices. Societies like Sweden's have, thus far, chosen not to have an 'hour-glass' economy, like the United States, where there's one group of relatively wealthy people, and another group of very poor people, with no mobility between them. If you average out the wealth in such an economy, I'm sure that, on average, everyone's doing alright. The only problem is that none of us is leading an average life. I love quotes like the one from Bergström and Gidehag - just goes to show how unscientific economics is! The top-selling car models in Sweden last year were Volvo, Saab and Mercedes, in that order, and lots of new cars were sold. Not bad for such a poverty-stricken economy! The fact that Reagan's chickens haven't come home to roost yet … and that Bush's are still out there in China (since the Chinese now own a major slice of the US economy, since they own so many US Treasury Bills) … is neither here nor there. You can waste money very quickly … but it takes a long time to earn it again (as we all find out when we max out our credit cards).

Small point: it's 'Kalmar', not 'Kamar'.

I ought to be able to fit this in to my schedule. I'll probably write and translate the material into Swedish myself, and then get someone Swedish to check it (probably Niklas Ammert).

Don't forget that we're emphasising ICT in this too. My goal is to get everyone up to speed with on-line meetings within a few months of the start of the project. Once we're all experienced with that, it's a relatively easy thing to get outside experts to participate via the network. The presentation I did in Gothenburg last September, for example, could easily have been done via Marratech (except that I'd have missed your company!). I'm not saying 'cut out all visits by experts', but perhaps we can get more for our money if we combine face-to-face with ICT-based contributions.