Göteborg 20 March 1996

Welcome to GEM40!

The situation for immigrants/refugees and the environment clearly are questions of serious concern today. In this course we will try to better understand these problems and maybe see how they relate to our way of life. We will try to understand our own role and try to see what we - as individuals and teachers - can do, and how we can make use of each other's experience and background, since these questions clearly are of very interdisciplinary character. We therefore hope that you will discuss several of these questions in a group, to learn from each other and to discover how many different ways there are to think about these difficult questions.

Enclosed you find some texts in English with relation to these themes. There will be more material throughout the course, and I also hope that we will be able to make good use to the emerging vast source of information: the World Wide Web.

Our first meeting will be on Thursday 28 March. It would be useful if you have then read Joseph Conrad: "The outpost of Progress". This is one of the texts quoted quite extensively by Sven Lindqvist in the book "Utrota varenda jävel" ("Exterminate all brutes"), which is part of the Swedish course material. I would like to ask each one of you to find a sentence or two in The outpost of Progress that you would like to share with us and perhaps comment on. I would also like you to give some thoughts to the following questions:

We will also discuss the form and schedule for the work during the next few weeks, (For the environmental part, we will be joined by a group of Swedish students who have spent some time this spring abroad).

During the second part of our first meeting, we will have access to a computer room, and get acquainted with the Internet, if you are not already. I also hope that you will be able to make at least one of your project reports in the from of a web page, and will show you how to do that. As a preparation, I would like you to take a look at the paper from Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction (the very last pages in the lot of English texts papers you get this time). Even better would be if you check it out on-line - the address, "the URL"is. http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut/ . You may find some links to start your explorations at the entry GEM40 om my page http://fy.chalmers.se/~f3aamp/teaching/, where I will also aim to keep an updated schedule.

As I see it, the Web is a GEM, not only for finding information, but also for simplifying the sharing of teaching material, and I am sure we will see much more of it in the future!

Looking forward to seeing you on Thursday 28!

Ann-Marie Pendrill
Dept. of Physics, 412 96 Göteborg , Sweden Telephone: 772 3282 (voice), 772 3496 (fax)
E-mail: Ann-Marie.Pendrill@fy.chalmers.se