About

What?

This blog is the assignment area for the University of Turku English-language lecture series on Finnish Contemporary History. The course is taught twice a year: once in August during the international summer school, and once during the Autumn term for exchange students. This blog is meant to welcome the students’ short assignments on subjects linked to the contemporary History of Finland. You will also find thereafter a description of the lecture series and assignment, a series of links, and a short bibliography. In the part “Main outlines”, you will find the main points developed in the course, along with reading lists for each subjects.

Assignments

As assignments, the students will write 500 to 1000 words long blog posts  on themes chosen at the beginning of the course. The teacher will distribute a series of themes, and each student will pick one theme to study, or come up with his or her own themes.

The posts should describe first the main elements of the subjects: what are we talking about, what happened, who is this man or woman, why is this subject relevant, important, etc. Then the student will be asked to contribute his or her own thinking to the text, and reflect on the importance of this theme, compare this development of Finland’s history with developments in his/her own country, give his/her own thoughts on the matter, etc. The posts can contain pictures, drawings, or other graphic material meant to illustrate or complete the text.

The posts should be based on personal, original research, and the sources should be listed at the end of the text. For example of blogposts, presentation and the listing of sources, look for example at the posts of this website: http://toynbeeprize.org/network-for-the-new-diplomatic-history/

Posts should be sent through an e-mail to the teacher of the course before the last session of the course. Everything received after that will be refused. This is so we can read and comment the posts during the last session of the class.

There are no hard rules as to language except that it should be clear, understandable, and to the point. If you do not feel comfortable writing in English, go for simple, short sentences. Problems with language may also occur because you do not see clearly what you want to express. So think hard before you start writing. Organize your thoughts in manageable bits that will be easier to express in a language you might not perfectly master.

In all cases, keep in mind George Orwell’s rules:

” I think the following rules will cover most cases:

(i)                  Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech
which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii)                Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii)               If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv)              Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v)                Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon
word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi)              Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.   ”

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946

Of these rules, the most important in our “copy-paste” era is clearly the first one. The formulas and ready-made bits you will find on Facebook and Wikipedia will help you get started and build vocabulary, but do not rely too heavily on them.

Archiving and confidentiality

Assignments will be classified in new pages, each page showing the year and venue of the lecture series (ex: Summer School 2012, Autumn term 2012, etc). These are considered as assignment material. They will also be archived for future reference and to help other students. Subjects and themes will be changed each time the course will be organized.

There is a degree of publicity involved in having short assignments with your names archived on a blog. For those of you uneasy with the proceedings, you have the possibility to present the text online anonymously – your name will not be added to the text, and following the end of the lecture series, the teacher will delete your assignment from the blog. Your name will not appear at any time on the blog.

For the others, the blogtexts you will produce will be archived with your names and a few lines of feedback.

In order to ensure that things are clear between us regarding confidentiality, each participant in the lecture series is asked to copy the following text into an e-mail, add one’s name, and send it to the teacher (Louis Clerc: loucle @ utu . fi):

———————

I, (YOUR NAME HERE),

agree to have my assignment text displayed on the blog Finnish Contemporary History, for critics and comments,  and made available under the Creative Commons licence system (Attribution – NonDerivs: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/) to future students as reference and inspiration.

———————

The students who do not send this text to the teacher will have their blog posts presented anonymously and deleted after the end of the lecture series.

Contact

Please do not hesitate to contact the organizer of the lecture series, at the following address:

Louis Clerc, PhD
Senior Lecturer / Yliopistonlehtori / Maître de conférences
Departement of Political Science and Contemporary History
20014 UNIVERSITY OF TURKU, Finland
loucle @ utu . fi
00 358 223336945

You can also comment in the comment section of the blog, either on general matters or on each other’s texts. Any derogative, out-of-place, racist, sexist or otherwise purposefully offending comments, as well as all criticisms expressed without arguments or with the obvious intention to humiliate, will be deleted without warning. Discussion should be conducted in a civilized and friendly manner.

Sources

These are a few general sources, both in print and online, to help you with your work.

. Fred Singleton, A Short History of Finland, 1998‏

. Jason Lavery, The History of Finland, 2009 (http://www.history-of-finland.com/)

. The best: Henrik Meinander, History of Finland, 2011

. For a wider perspective: David Kirby, The Baltic World, 1995

. The Finnish History Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Finland

We would also like to remind you of two important sources for information on more specific issues.

. First of all, the libraries available in Turku: the University of Turku libraries, the Åbo Akademi library, and last but not least the Turku City Library…The University of Turku and the City Library are great ressource centers, where you will also find a nice environment to work. Turku University also provides online service through the Nelli portal – don’t hesitate to discuss the thing with the Library’s clerks.

. Second, the many online repositories for scientific articles, that you can access through the University computers, and of which JSTOR is the most famous. Those are treasure throves of material, and excellent sources.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia, as all sources, should be considered critically and cross-referenced. Wikipedia is not bad as such, and globally the work done by the contributors is impressive and respectable. But these should be considered critically, in the same way as edited books or academic journal articles should be. Wikipedia is also limited by the interests of the contributors, and there are subjects on which you will not find an English-language Wikipedia page. At the same time, some entries are excellent pieces of synthesis on a subject, properly sourced and well-written

So there is a difficult balance to find while using Wikipedia entries. The best way to do it is to use those as a starting point, the place to get your first notions of a theme. After that, you should be careful. Cross-check as a rule, and be especially weary of entries that do not cite their sources, or which quote only other Wikipedia articles or online material. One quality criteria in academic articles is the capacity of the researcher to show his or her sources and proove their reliability – Wikipdia should be considered in the same way. Verify the sources, and when you can, refer to the original sources.

I couldn’t express this better than the Wikipedia FAQ itself:

“The reliability of Wikipedia articles is limited by the external sources on which they are supposed to rely, as well as by the ability of Wikipedia’s editors to understand those sources correctly and their willingness to use them properly. Therefore, articles may or may not be reliable, and readers should always use their own judgment. Students should never use information in Wikipedia (or any other online encyclopedia) for formal purposes (such as school essays) until they have verified and evaluated the information based on external sources. For this reason, Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, is a great starting place for research but not always a great ending place.“

Generally, posts based solely on Wikipedia articles will be refused.