Towards a Web-based Development Programme

Students

For Stockholm-based students, the current ‘yellow book’ with course readings should be available as an electronic document with book reviews and articles linked for downloading off the web. Web publication in English of the best assignments with monetary prizes each term would also help put the institution on the map. Allan Larsson’s lectures should be available as ‘radio programmes’ in Swedish and English.

The introductory course in economic history should be re-focussed as a ‘global university distance learning course’ in political economy perhaps as a joint venture with the Baltic University and with American universities with a strong Scandinavian programme.

The introductory course should be developed as the first stage in creating  a Baltic University web-ring for political economy, Stockholm pioneering the first link in the ring and then providing ‘development aid’ to Gdansk, St Petersberg, Riga etc. to enable them to join the web-ring within five years. Visby in VT 2000 could provide a pilot scheme.

Comparative research at other Baltic 'economic history electronic research centres’ would grow out of this programme with students carrying out ‘web-top research’ initially but then becoming involved in scholarly exchange as their knowledge and competence increases.

Development of the web facilities at the institution itself would allow it to become a centre for 'public political economy research' through links to personal, family and clan research projects by non-academic researchers. This could also have the advantage of opening up new sources of historical data.

Research

The institute should take the lead in integrating Swedish (and then Baltic) historical archives by structuring the top-level website and linking these archive web sites into a ‘webring’ and a virtual research institute library. Direction for the project should come, not from librarians, but from those familiar with using ‘historical sources’.

The holder of the keys to the libraries of the future will be the webmasters who control the flow in the pipeline moving information onto websites and through cyberspace to (a) inhabitants in the Stockholm City Region, (b) citizens of the Baltic Lakes Region and (c) further afield to the Swedish diasporas dotted along the 19th century water trails of  the North Atlantic and elsewhere around the globe.

 A web based strategy is likely to look very different to traditional textbooks. Swedish research will have a comparative advantage in the following soecific areas of inter-national historical research. Future research leadership will lie in the development of a web research strategy for each of these fields.

School Links

A requirement should be introduced that (B), C, D and doctoral studies include an internet ‘school-link’ and a web-based development strategy for school curricula.

The idea is for the researcher to learn to 'generalise from her particular knowledge' and integrate her research (and knowledge of its historical context) with (a) the broader and more generalist-oriented school curriculum and (b) the wider worldview that ‘students’ are now acquiring, outside of schooling, from ‘the university of life’, family history (eg. immigrants), internet, television, etc.

'Maps, Mapping and Modelling' written in July 1989 suggests the possibility of educational products that could provide a new generation of educational tools ideally suited for ‘increased pass-through rates’ in a learning society.

Friday 4th June 1999