Erasmus-Course

Tampere / Finland

April 15-20, 1996

Participating Universities: Tampere (coordinator); Linz, Bremen, Alcala, Leicester, Helsinki and Joensuu

To get acquainted: Welcome to a Tour of Old Tampere!

1: Historical Demography I = CD-ROM "Historische Demographie I"

2: Historical Demography II: = CD-ROM(s) + WWW on votive tablets

3: CD-ROM + WWW: = The ideal combination

4: Ars moriendi = The Art of Dying well; 15th century and today (CD-ROM + WWW)

5: The Hanse merchant Georg Gisze, London, 1532, by Hans Holbein = The concept of a "life plan" (CD-ROM + WWW)

6: Clouds = An interdisciplinary approach (CD-ROM + WWW; a further example for the "life plan")

Kindly assisted by :

The University of Tampere

and

Tampere University of Technology

The overall background of all lectures, seminars, and workshops is historical demography in a very broad sense. Let´s put it this way: Some generations ago, the average age at death was around 25 to 35 years, with a wide range of deviation of course. In the mean time, i. e. after the fundamental change from an always precarious existence to a reasonably secure life time, the ages at death focused and lay twice or three times as high as earlier. In comparison to our ancestors, we have thus two or three lives at our disposition.

But we have not only quantitatively more, but also qualitatively better years. Otherwise, the outcome would not have been possible. Nevertheless, we are not living in an (earthly) paradise. Problems changed. Not everybody knows e. g., what to do with all the many years. Gained years are not automatically fulfilled years. It is up to us to make the best out of our long lives.

The week thus starts with some basics from historical demography. These "hard facts" are then confronted with dozens of "soft pictures" from votive tablets, demonstrating why the existence of our forbears always was so precarious. At the same time, they disposed of stabilizing elements, e. g. the art of dying. We will have a close look at the so called "picture-ars" of the 15th century, a kind of popular "comic strip", consisting of eleven wood cuts, "readable" even for illiterates. (The question then is, if we in our time should perhaps not developed a new ars moriendi for our time, and if so: what we could learn from the old one.) During the second halv of the week, we turn to the more recent problems of our long lives and will focus on the concept of a "life plan". What possibilities do we have to transform the gained years into fulfilled years. Here again, pictures will play an important rôle.

The lectures, seminars, and workshops will be based on my usual CD-ROM- and WWW-teaching material from Berlin (therefore the methodological topic on CD-ROM and WWW as an ideal combination). Most texts are thus in german. But the normally rather short explanations and legends to the many included graphs, figures, and pictures should be understandable for everybody. Please familiarize yourself already now with the topics by displaying the WWW-contents on your PC-monitor and by following the hot words and icons (best using the Netscape-browser).

Working languages during the week may be english, german, french, and swedish. (I grew up in Switzerland and spent seven years in Scandinavia.) Working hours are from early in the morning until late in the afternoon, but there are no evening arrangements. Earlybirds will be rewarded, since access to the internet is easier and faster when the rest of the (western) world (still) sleeps.

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Participants should:

• be familiar with the Internet (World Wide Web)
• be familiar with the organization of an own home-page and how to build own HTML - documents
• have access to a CD-ROM-drive
• be familiar with a paint-software (e. g. the shareware Paint Shop Pro 3)