David Richardson

Looks good to me.

Kalmar can hold a meeting. April and October are better than September and May for us.

As I've mentioned before on this forum, I've had quite a few older students here in Sweden who served in the army during WW2 up on one of the borders to German-occupied or -controlled territory (um … that would be all of them, which is one of the factors about Sweden's neutrality during WW2 which often gets overlooked by US and British observers). Lots of them remember having comrades-in-arms who were detailed to shoot the officers in the event of a German invasion of Sweden. The Swedish officer corps was heavily influenced by Nazism (as were certain of the influential sectors of society, such as industrialists, the Royal family, etc), and the soldiers were certain that their officers wouldn't fight back if the Germans invaded. It's recently emerged that Swedish nazi sympathisers had compiled lists of people who were to be executed or sent to concentration camps. There were also several places in Sweden where the local police were more or less in cahoots with the Germans on the other side of the border and thus handed any escapees from Norway straight back to the Germans (the Värmland police were notorious for this). I'm sure that Nazi rule of Sweden would have had the support of quite a lot of influential Swedes - the sort who owned factories and newspapers. I'm also sure that there would have been plenty of terror too. When was Wannsee? 1942? Although the Nazis had set things in motion before the war, we have to remember that they had a very short space of time available to murder all the people they did. I think that there's plenty of evidence that they'd have been even more brutal if they'd had the absence of external threat and 20 years to practise in … and that the ridiculousness of all these specious comparisons between Nazism and Communism would be even clearer.

Just a note about Swedish right-wingers. There's an election campaign underway at the moment, and the ruling Social Democrats are being supported by the Vänsterpartiet - who used to be called VPK - Vänsterpartiet kommunist - just a few years ago. In other words, there's a bit of electoral advantage being sought at the moment. It may be backfiring on them, though, since the links between the German Nazis and various right-wing parties in Sweden were at least as strong as the ones between Stalin and Swedish Communists. One of the main (right-wing) papers here has just turned the spotlight on the Centerpartiet - which used to be called the Farmers' Party in the 1930s and was a staunch supporter of racial hygiene and Nazism …

I'm sorry I've been so quiet recently on this Forum. The rest of the family all came down with various ailments, most of which involved bodily fluids spurting about and needing to cleaned up by the only person who was healthy (that's me, David, the night nurse …). Fortunately, they're all now on the mend … but what I've had to do this week shows how useful flexible learning can be in a crisis, because I've more or less managed to teach and respond to students in between patients. This got me thinking about the Citizenship Project and how you could add a European dimension to it. I was asked by John to become involved as someone who uses ICT in his teaching, and it's in that gestalt that I'm writing now. Last Thursday I had to run a four-hour seminar on using technology to teach languages over in Borgholm on Öland (the long, thin island off the coast near Kalmar). In the end, I ran it from our spare room at home here in Kalmar, about 40 kms away. The locale in Borgholm had an 8MB/s broadband connection, which is more or less what I and the other participant, Bryan Carter from Missouri, had too. Firewalls were conspicuous by their absence, so we set up a laptop, connected to their broadband connection and to a projector/speakers/webcam/echo-cancelling microphone, over there. We were going to do this anyway to let Bryan come in, but it suddenly became really urgent. There wasn't time to warn the participants (teachers at all levels with Borgholm Council - average age, about 50, interest in and experience of computers, very limited) of the change of plan. However, we managed to run the session using Marratech, which included me taking them through how to make interactive Word documents and web pages, running listening comprehension exercises properly, and using video in the language classroom, successfully. Halfway through (when it was 8 am in Missouri), Bryan came on line (so that there were three stations connected up) and we ran an interactive session on more futuristic aspects of technology in schools, such as blogging, podcasting and using 'microworlds' (virtual, often 3D, environments). There was a lot of interactivity, both in the room in Borgholm, and between them and Bryan and me. The evaluation we ran at the end of the session was extremely positive (I'd have invited you to join us, if I'd had time to think about anything other than patients and teaching this week). I'm busy putting together a reflection of what went on for the participants on Thursday, and I'll be happy to send a copy to anyone who wants one (just mail me - it's a fairly small Word document). What I thought about this was that the cost of the extra equipment used in Borgholm (I'm excluding the computer and projector, since they're bog standard, and the broadband connection, because that's nothing exclusive to this way working either) was about €1,000 tops. The cost of the Marratech server we used is about €2,000 per annum, but bear in mind that we were using about 1/20 of its capacity for only four hours out of that year. If we were going to use Marratech for various activities on the Citizenship Project, the smart thing to do would be to borrow a room from Kalmar. There was very little technical difficulty: we just plugged the PC into the wall, and turned it on. Firewalls cause greater problems, but these are basically surmountable, especially if we're talking about a facility you can use for lots of different subjects in lots of different ways. The bottom line for me is that the technology already exists for both teachers and pupils throughout Europe to work actively with each other from where they happen to be. Imagine a co-operative project between several European countries focussed on a specific subject, such as how you get a lower speed limit to be imposed on the street outside your school. I know that one problem would be language … but isn't the overcoming of that problem one of the things that this whole European idea is supposed to be about?

In Sweden an attempt is made to balance freedom and responsibility in public utterances with the system of 'ansvarig utgivare' (person responsibile for publication). If you publish views on a website, or in a forum, or on paper, some named, identifiable person has to be nominated as responsible for the site, forum, book or newspaper. It's a bit like the requirement on this forum to publish a biography - it helps people to put a limit on their own behaviour. As regards Denmark, I don't think it's widely known just how racist the Danish government has become over the last few years. Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish Prime Minister, won the last election with a deliberate strategy of blaming Muslims for society's ills, and his government has been heavily influenced by the Danish People's Party (more or less like the BNP: their leader's latest announcement - after the xxxx hit the fan - was "Islam is like a weed that's spread over our country and we're the people to root it out"). I've been struck by the sanction this has given to everyday acts of racist abuse, such as being on a bus in Copenhagen and seeing a white Dane turn round to a coloured Dane with a headscarf and say "You trash shouldn't be allowed to sit on the same seats as decent people" … and watching the rest of the passengers either look away in embarrassment or smile in approval. It doesn't half remind you of another country not that far away from Denmark, who had plenty of the same sort of sentiments in the 1930s towards another religious minority. The Danish right like to say that Sweden (and other countries) has exactly the same situation as Denmark, it's just that the Danes are brave enough to talk about it. What a load of rubbish! (I'd write something stronger, but I don't want to offend sensitivities!). It's about time the record of the Scandinavian right vis-à-vis Nazism was put under the spotlight - it's not a nice story … and there's plenty of evidence of a direct continuation from then to now. The bottom line is: how do you defend democracy from the forces which are actively trying to destroy it? I'm not talking about a politically powerless group (in Western Europe) like the Muslims, but of politically powerful groups, like the assorted mainstream right-wing political parties in Europe. We know what happened in Germany in the 1930s …

I sympathise fully with Derek's points. Alex Savage and I have been trying to link up to each other since October using the 'communications' bit of Information and Communications Technology. We haven't succeeded yet (except once when something went 'wrong' and he managed to get a piece of expensive equipment to work for the first time since it was bought as part of some UK government initiative a couple of years ago - his IT manager quickly shut that possibility down). It's an interesting dilemma, isn't it. If you use the technology only for information, you ultimately get very bored with it. If you use it for information + communications, it comes into its own … but the school IT network stops you. (I'm very fortunate in being on the Swedish university network, so I've got an immense amount of freedom.) This is why blogging and podcasting is so attractive to me - these two technologies are outside the control of IT departments! I've been looking at Apple's iWeb + mac.com system which makes both blogging and podcasting very easy, and I've let our technicians know where I'll be going if they try erecting unnecessary barriers to what I do!

Let me elaborate on my previous post a little. Teachers can be instructors, we can be trainers and we can be educators. I've come across a lot of instructors in my days working with the Swedish Army: "Lieutenant: Step 4: Place road wheel support under half-axle of wheel to be removed like this. Has everyone understood Step 4? Conscripts: Ja, lojtnant!" It doesn't take much training to be an instructor - the conscripts were supposed to learn the steps and then come forward and reproduce the lieutenant's instructions almost straightaway. We do a lot of training too ("This is how you get through the test …"). But it's our role as educators which is really subversive. I keep going back to the Latin roots of the word: to lead people out of or away from one state and into another (with the emphasis on 'lead', rather than 'do it for them'). Leadership, when it's done properly and isn't just instruction + bullying, is a very personal and individual affair, and it's extremely difficult to express in a 'leadership manual'. When it comes to the 'state' that the teacher is leading her pupils or students into, what that state is is a very personal choice on the part of the teacher … which is why teachers need high levels of intellectual honesty, if we're to avoid becoming brainwashers or propagandists. My thesis in this discussion is that teachers all over the world have been intimidated away from the role of educator and forced into, at best, being coaches or trainers, and at worst instructors, following the manual the control freaks have written for us. For some of us, of course, no intimidation was necessary … This doesn't mean that our pupils and students aren't being educated any more - it's just that they're being educated from other sources … such as computer games, Hollywood, TV, magazines, etc. The intimidation has taken different forms in different countries … but unless teachers take back our role of educator, we can't really complain about the results of the education the pupils and students have received. I'm not claiming it's going to be easy to reclaim our role - it was intimidation which got us here in the first place, and it's never easy to fight against intimidation. Perhaps it's time to start a new CAMRED: (that's a Campaign for Real Education, rather than Grimsby Town FC supporters' campaign for red stockings …)

No, I was trying to make a sllghtly different point: it's not 'our fault', but we're the only people who can actively do something about it, at least on the local level. I'm not saying it's going to be easy to buck the trend of de-professionalism, but it has to be done … and obviously the managers aren't going to do it, and neither are the politicians.

I still come back to the power of conformity. The 'old ways' of teaching weren't necessarily very good. I remember studying French using grammar-translation with a very enthusiastic teacher - and I carried on right up to a good A level pass. However, a whole lot of my classmates didn't … and when I look at how much I actually learned, it doesn't match up to the number of hours I spent learning it, and my French was still much more deficient than it should have been, given the resources devoted to it. My own explanation for the dumbing down Mike T describes is that old-style teachers, who were only partially successful even with highly-motivated, upper-middle class pupils, suddenly found themselves having to teach everyone, including the lower-end of the ability range. They kept on trying to do the same thing as they'd always done, but found that they didn't even have the threat associated with their old authority to keep the pupils in line … so they copped out. The solution, for me, has to include one important element: teachers have to get better at what they do, and they have to take control of their professional lives back from their line managers. This might not be a sufficient condition for improvement, but it's certainly a necessary one.

Niklas Ammert and I have just had a meeting about this. It comes to 140 days @ €315 per day.

The overthrow of the Mossadeq government in Iran (for the heinous crime of wanting control of Iranian oil to be held by Iranians, rather than British or US oil companies) was probably one of the most disastrous CIA topplings of a democratic government. It sent a very clear message to the whole of the Middle East that the US wasn't really interested in democracy - only US control of natural resources.

One of those new Mac Intel laptops with a built-in camera costs €2699, according to Apple's French site. I suppose that includes VAT. You'd also get iChatAV, which allows for 4-way instant video conferencing. Marratech is a useful extra, since iChat doesn't have a whiteboard. However, Macs are a minority taste (a minority I happen to be part of). Perhaps the PC users among us would prefer a PC?

Tim, I was born in the country from which the USA has traditionally learned the techniques of subtle repression: the United Kingdom. It's strange how often dunderheads make mistakes which result in freedom being denied and the powerful being let off the hook. Secret policemen in communist dictatorships and the mutawa (religious police) in a US ally like Saudi Arabia tend to be clumsier, but it's the thought that counts, isn't it.

There's a wonderful phrase in Swedish (coined, I think, by Olof Palme) which is to "choose between the plague and cholera). I think Palme first used it when an opponent asked him to differentiate betwee Franco's Spain and Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnam. In other words, I'm not saying that Cuba is a good society - it's a dictatorship. BTW, I was meaning conservative with a small 'c' - that we human beings generally don't like looking at the way things really are, but want to hark back to a supposed golden age. --------- I've just come across this article by Cindy Sheehan in the LA Times, which I think has some relevance to this debate. I don't usually like to just copy loads of text from somewhere else into this forum, but I thought she expresses herself well. I know, by the way, that Cindy Sheehan isn't the flavour of the month in some circles in the USA, but I just read these words and made a judgement on them as they stood, since I'm not party to the debate she and her supporters are in within the USA. From LA Times By Cindy Sheehan, CINDY SHEEHAN is a co-founder of Gold Star Families for Peace and a member of Military Families Speak Out. I WAS ARRESTED in the U.S. Capitol just minutes before the State of the Union address for wearing a T-shirt that pointed out how many Americans, like my son, Casey, have been killed in Iraq. The T-shirt simply said: "2,245 Dead. How Many More?" During the address, President Bush uttered the word "freedom" 17 times, saying that was what our troops were fighting in Iraq to defend. At a minimum, you'd think we would all have the freedom to express ourselves through slogans on a T-shirt. Is this what my son died for? Is this theft of our precious freedom of speech the "noble cause" that Bush told us our soldiers are fighting for? Sure, I'm outspoken and don't normally shy away from protesting. But that wasn't my plan. Just hours before the speech, I had been given a ticket by Rep. Lynn Woolsey of Petaluma, who has worked to press Congress to bring the troops home. At first I didn't really want to go, and I gave the ticket away to someone who gave it back. I would not have been disruptive out of respect for Lynn and the many other members of Congress I deeply admire. I intended to make a statement, not a scene. Had I wanted to create a disruption, I would have waited until the president arrived to reveal my shirt. My ticket was in the fifth gallery, front row. An officer — who a few minutes later would arrest me — helped me to my seat. I had just sat down and was warm from climbing three flights of stairs, so I unzipped my jacket. I turned to the right to take my left arm out when the officer saw my shirt and yelled "protester!" He then hauled me out of my seat and shoved me up the stairs. The officer ran, pulling me with him, to an elevator, yelling at everyone to move out of the way. Then he handcuffed me as we rode down and then took me outside to await a squad car. DESPITE WHAT was said in several reports, I was never asked to change the shirt or zip up my jacket. If I had been asked to do those things I would have and expressed concerns about the suppression of my freedom of speech later. I was immediately and roughly (I have the bruises and muscle spasms to prove it) hauled off and arrested for "unlawful conduct." The reports about my being "vocal," attributed to the police, are also untrue. Lawyers have advised me that I was well within my constitutional rights to wear a T-shirt emblazoned with a slogan. The police belatedly agreed and said they would drop the charges. I don't understand how they could have held me in jail for four hours before saying that this was all a mistake. After my personal items were inventoried and my fingerprints taken, a nice sergeant came in and looked at my shirt and said, "2,245, huh? I just got back from there." I told him that my son died there. That's when the enormity of my loss hit me. On top of losing my son, I have lost my 1st Amendment rights. Where did my America go? I started crying in pain. What did Casey die for? What did the 2,244 other brave young Americans die for? What are tens of thousands of them over there in harm's way for? For this? I can't even wear a shirt that has the number of troops on it that Bush and his arrogant and ignorant policies are responsible for killing. Polls indicate that the people in our country and Iraq want this war to end. The war is making this country and the world less safe and secure. It's time to stop the killing by bringing the troops home. I wore the shirt to make a statement. I believed it was my right to do so. I don't want to live in a country that prohibits any person from wearing, saying, writing or relaying over a telephone negative statements about the government. That's why I am taking my freedoms and liberties back. That's why I am not going to let the Bush administration take anything else away from me. They already took my son away. That was more than enough. ---------- Now I know that she'd have been treated differently in Cuba - at least there would have been a difference in degree (she'd have been detained a lot longer). However, Cuba doesn't have a monopoly on the suppression of dissent, does she.

At Swedish universities we automatically get 200 hours/term for 'competence development'. I'll look into the possibility of Niklas and I being able to use some of these hours each term for participation in the project. If (as I strongly suspect) this is OK, our participation will be largely 'funded' by Kalmar (in the cockeyed way that accountants work). (This is how I participated in Gothenburg, by the way.) As regards workloads, etc, I feel that we should develop our ability to meet virtually (as I've said elsewhere). If we can have an hour-long meeting each month, to review progress, and if we are very clear about what is to be done, by whom and when, then there's a very good chance that we'll get into a virtuous circle of working together, and the people who do more won't become irritated by the people who do less (and vice versa!). In a situation like this, payment for work done, rather than a standard sum, irrespective of what gets done, is likely to be more acceptable to everyone.

I agree with you Tim about the suppression of political dissent in Cuba … what a shame that the USA imposed the blockade on Cuba, since I'm convinced that Castro would have fallen in the late 1960s, if the USA had kept its ties with Cuba. In Europe, people who flee from a poorer country to a richer one are called 'economic migrants' and are treated like dirt. The poorer countries they flee from are almost invariably less free than the ones they flee to, at least in terms of the formalities of democracy. As I've written in other places before, the situation in the USA is so distorted, that it's difficult to know what's a cause and what's an effect. However, what is going to happen to Cuba when Castro dies? I can well foresee a major push by Cuban-Americans to 'retake' Cuba. Knowing how conservative most human beings are, I can well imagine that the picture they'll have of a 'free' Cuba is one where the old economic elites retake power … and Cuba will once again become a haven for drug-dealing, prostitution, the Mafia, etc. This isn't idle speculation - look at the dramatic decline in health, birth-rates, prosperity and general happiness since the Soviet Union fell. Cuba as Haiti? I think I'd rather have Castro and Communism (although I'd love Cuba to become more like Sweden).

I remember visiting Savannah in 1982, and straying about 100 yards from the waterfront. The conditions people were living in there were way worse than the conditions in Angola in 1985 … and Angola was in the middle of a full-scale war, and had been for nearly 30 years. I remember ex-President Nixon being interviewed on CNN during the Clinton attempt to reform the US health service saying "People from all over the world want to come to the US for medical treatment …" and me thinking "you missed something out - it should have been 'all over the Third World'". I should imagine that the numbers of Swedes who go to the US for medical treatment is about the same as the number of Americans who go to Sweden for it … otherwise, I can't imagine why anyone would give up the cheap and highly-efficient Swedish health service in favour of the US one. BTW, I've taught many an old-age pensioner who emigrated to the US when he or she was 18 … only to come back just in time to enjoy the Swedish welfare state on retirement. Another aside … the Cubans were still in Angola when I was there (teaching English for marine biologists to the Angolan Ministry of Fisheries for the Swedish National Fisheries Board, so that Angolans could hold the Soviets to account when the Soviets exchanged Angolan fish for war matériel … but that's another story). Me and my colleague, Raoul Pereira, who'd been sprung out of a Uruguay jail by the Swedish branch of Amnesty International (another other story), were always followed by crowds of people who wanted to shake our hands and call us 'Primo' (Cuban military slang for buddy - it's how the Angolans knew who their friends were on the battlefield as they were whupping the asses of the South African Army). Time and again, when our papers were checked (we were in a war zone), we were called 'camerada Cubano' - and they just didn't believe that a couple of dark-haired, mustachioed white men were English and 'Swedish' respectively! The Cubans were immeasurably popular among the ordinary people of Angola.

I think that we should practise what we preach, and equip the laptops with webcams and headsets (earphones + mikes). If I were making the decision, I'd get us each one of these new Mac Intel laptops with built-in cameras … but that's just me! If we're successful in getting the funds I suggest strongly that we start meeting virtually, both via desktop video conference (like Marratech, which I'm sure we'll be able to host), and VOIP (voice over IP - Skype, Gizmo, etc, which also do conference calls). Gizmo, by the way, draws you instant maps of where all the connected points are, giving you really flash pictures to put on the web site! I suggest, for example, that as much of the business of drawing up meeting programmes, writing reports, budgeting, etc, etc as possible happens via a system like Marratech (which has a shared whiteboard, so that we can all look at the same text at the same time, amend it and download it to our own computers), so that we can devote face-to-face time to developing the project actively instead of discussing the nitty-gritty details of meeting procedure. Besides being a much more efficient way of spending our time, it could also harmonise with the one of the aims of the project (using ICT). By the way, here in Kalmar we have several large rooms which are Marratech-enabled, which allows us to have virtual meetings between teachers of citizenship in Sweden and their counterparts in other countries. The costs and technical difficulties of setting 'the other end' up are not that great (provided your IT departments play along).

I can confirm that we can host a meeting. The school year in Sweden starts in mid-August and continues right up to the very beginning of June. I'd suggest that any visit to Kalmar falls within the September - May period, so that you've got the opportunity to both visit schools and meet teachers of citizenship (perhaps our school-based training mentors' network). The weather's not too bad here both in Spring and Autumn (January and February are good months *not* to come to Sweden, if you don't like the cold!).

I've got our departmental accountant working on this, and I'll get back to you soon.

Here are the details for Högskolan i Kalmar (I just hope they're what you want!). Kalmar_Citizenship_details.doc I hope I've now uploaded the right file. Just after I'd posted my first version, our International Office rang back and said that our Erasmus ID Code is actually: S KALMAR 01 … and nothing else (note the two spaces between 'S' and 'KALMAR').

Terry Haydn's got a mate who's a bit of a livewire in this area: Alex Savage (I think he's a member of this forum too). Alex coordinates IT in the Norwich area, as well as teaching French at a schoo in Norwich.

Here's my two-pennorth: Teaching Citizenship in a Globalized Europe Using ICT

I've just included a description of our first joint podcasts with Missouri on the Flexible Learning sub-forum: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5559