No 2 2005

“The importance of knowing a foreign language” was the title of an essay I wrote as an exchange student at a high school in the US many years ago. I discussed why Americans should focus more on language education because, I argued, even though English is more or less the lingua franca of the world today, there are many additional values to being able to communicate in another language than your mother tongue. Learning a foreign language means learning a foreign culture, which may not be such a bad idea in our globalised world.

News in brief by the Global Knowledge staff.

“As donors, we have neglected secondary and tertiary education,” says Norad’s new Director-General Poul Engberg-Pedersen. But he will not promise greater support for higher education and research.

Good thinking is needed to secure stability in Uzbekistan. Intellectuals in the Central Asian republic now hope to join forces with Norwegian philosophers.

A geology/ecology project with Norwegian, South African and Mozambican partners has been voted by its South African participants the most successful collaborative project they have ever attended.

Norway, a country with no nuclear industry, hosts a major international – and controversial – research co-operation aimed at improving the reliability and safety of nuclear power plants.

More than a million children are victims of trafficking every year. Few rehabilitation centres are directed at assisting children, according to a recent report by Norwegian and Serbian researchers.

Swapping their notepads for cameras, students and teachers in the Visual Cultural Studies programme in Tromsø are challenging the traditional hegemony of social sciences.

Western children think it is funny when someone falls down. African children do not, according to researchers from five countries who have been comparing children's sense of humour.

The problem of African development is a problem of language. No country has ever developed on the basis of a borrowed minority language, according to Professor Kwesi Kwa Praah. He is on a challenging mission to harmonize African languages.

Who: Johan Moan, professor of physics
Where: Department of Physics, University of Oslo, Norway
What: In the World Year of Physics 2005, Professor Johan Moan is helping to develop a course of study in medical physics at Tibet University in Lhasa

For a Polish primary school that is falling apart, sustainable redevelopment bears the hope of a better future.

Sylvia Nannyonga-Tamusuza from Uganda is the professor who is turning typical roles upside down. She is in Norway to study Norwegians’ attitudes to African dancing.

To Fatuma Mfunami, Uluguru means more than just beautiful mountains with rivers, waterfalls and the songs of many birds. Uluguru has always been her home and the mountains have been a source of food for her family for as long as she can remember.

The people of Malawi are facing hunger, reports the UN. “As researchers, we have a responsibility to do something with the results we get from research projects,” says Professor of Medicine Johanne Sundby.

Starting in 2007, Master’s and PhD programmes in physics will be available at Eduardo Mondlane University (EMU) in Mozambique.

The future of Africa is more than ever dependent on the future of Africa’s universities. And the future of Africa’s universities is dependent on successful co-operation in the increasingly competitive and global arena of research and higher education. Therefore the Association of African Universities (AAU) probably has a more important role to play than ever.

The notion that children are experts on their own subjective experience, perceptions and lives is something that is increasingly being conceded. As Grover (2004: 83) therefore asserts, there is a need to provide children with the opportunity to “define themselves through collaboration in the research process, rather than being defined solely by adult interests, biases and agendas.”