The purpose of this paper is to see how politicians use Internet communication in their daily work and how they use it to interact with citizens of Vasteras city. To reach my conclusions I used both theoretical methods such as literature studies and qualitative interviews with the towns 11 trustees. Accoarding to this study the politicians saw not only a lot of potentials and advantages in Internet communication but also many difficulties and obstacles. In this case the cons far exceeded the pros. One of the main reason is the bad experiences which caused by rasist attacks/threats made to politicians and also the difficulties in handling of sensitiv documents which was seen as a stress factor.

A reading campaign, Läsrörelsen The Reading Movement took place in Sweden 2000 until 2002. It was started by some adult educationists, and was supported by over 120 organizations. The aim of my study was to examine which messages the campaign wanted to mediate. As the campaign meant that reading was important for democracy, I wanted to study if there was any public debate about reading around 1900 when the democracy process had just started in Sweden. I have also studied if reading is regarded in the same way by the rulers of Sweden as it was by the campaign.

Deliberative democracy theory holds that democracy is about active partaking on formal and informal arenas in the public sphere where fairly equal citizens can obtain knowledge, discuss, evaluate and affect the political agenda before decisions are made.In line with the deliberative vision of online deliberation social media such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Twingly offer such formal and informal arenas where people can obtain knowledge and interact with other people, and politicians.The Swedish EU-Presidency was the first EU-presidency to make use of social media and it was the first time the Swedish Government Offices used other social media than email and chat features.This thesis will examine the Swedish EU-Presidency?s ambitions of using social media as well as the actual use of social media on the Swedish EU-Presidency website in the light of deliberative democracy theory.The aim of this thesis is, through a case study, to analyze the Swedish EU-Presidency?s use of social media in the light of deliberative democracy theory..

The purpose of this study is to find out what the educators idea of educational documentations in ratio to childrens inclusion and impact in pre-school are, together with the child's own perception of the concepts of documentation. We proceeded from the following issues: What are the significance of educational work according to the teachers? What is the teachers idea of a childs impact and inclusion in educational documentation? In what way do the children have influence over, and inclusion in educational documentation? What are the childrens feelings of the documentations? In order to find answers to our questions, we used qualitative examinations consisting of seven educators and seven children from various pre-schools in Stockholm, and thereby, we have analyzed our results. As our theoretical frame, we used ourselves of Vygotskijs and Säljö's sociocultural perspective that is about "progress and learning", which is achieved by interaction and cooperation in a social context. The result shows that the aim of educational documentation is to reveal the childs development and learning, and also to involve the parents by putting up documents on the wall.

This essay focus on the European Union and its democracy both from a national perspec­tive and from an international perspective. Furthermore, the essay center on the con­cept of democratic deficit, this in order to study the European Union´s status regarding the democratic legitimacy. This study intends to nuance the problems that previous research and previous researchers have de­fined as democratic deficits in the European Union and ends up in conducting a textual anal­ysis of the latest European Union treaty, the Lisbon Treaty.The aim is that by using previous research on the democratic deficit in the European Union examine whether the Lisbon Treaty has enhanced the EU's position regarding democratic legitimacy. In other words, my study aims to identify what the deficit is and if it exists.The results show that the Lisbon Treaty has been trying to improve the democratic legitimacy and that some practical adjustments have been made, but it also show that there is much that still can be improved before citizens have full democratic rights..

The purpose of this comparative study is to investigate if the views of Sayyid Qutb and Tariq Ramadan regarding social structure and religion are possible to unite with western liberal democracy. The basis of the study is the problematizing approaches written by Qutb and Ramadan regarding the possible unity between Islam and democracy. These problematizing approaches are then tested on the political philosophy of liberalism to see if a unity is possible.The result showed that Qutb's view did not meet the criteria of democracy, which wasn't surprising due to his negative views on the system. However, Ramadan's reformist view on Muslim identity did unite with the views of liberal democracy, though questions regarding the possibility of creating and preserving a European Muslim identity in the secular society were immediately brought to attention.The importance in Qutb's view is social equality, unity and submission to God and the importance of Ramadan's view is to create and preserve a European Muslim identity and adapt to the society where you live and participate as a citizen. Qutb's view will not tolerate diversity and one is to keep or convert to the Muslim faith.

The purpose of this essay is to study if and how five South African educators work with music as a special pedagogical tool in children's language development. To achieve the purpose of this study, two research questions were created. As method, interviews of a qualitative character were chosen.  The aim of the method is to give the educators the opportunity to think about and use their own experience before answering the questions.The result shows that the South African educators are not using music as a special educational tool. They rather use music as an everyday educational tool to promote children's language development. The result indicates that music in educational activities promotes children?s communication with each other.

The urgency of sustanible development is world-over issue. This essay focuses on the relations of enviromental ethics in the context of the Swedish upper secondary school and the subject of geography, by analysing different educational texts.The purpose of this essay is to reveal and identify discourses of enviromental ethics in curriculum documents; Lgr 11 and the plan- and the coursedocuments for the subject of geography, in educational publisher?s textbooks and in sponsored texts related to the subject of geography and finally to discuss potential consequences this might implicate for education. For this have the methodology of Norman Fairclough´s critical discourse theory, CDA, as well as a matrix of environmental ethics, based upon Mikael Stenmarks classifications of enviromental ethics, been used.In the Cirriculum, Lgr 11 and documents for the subject of Geography, and in the educational textbooks from ?Liber? and ?Gleerups?, are the environmental ethics of intergenerational anthropocentrism the dominant.

AbstractSince democracy was developed in the ancient Greece it has come to be used within a small city state, within the national state and as today used within a bigger perspective. After the end of the second world war political leaders wanted to make sure that there would never be a war between European countries again. Now, about 60 years later this type of cooperation now involves 27 of the European countries and goes under the name of the Euroapean Union. This means that democracy is no longer used just within the nation state, but within a big organisation that is responsible for almost 500 million Europeans lives. This also means that the European Union need to make some institutional reforms to be able to handle all the future challenges.

This work is about leisure educators' views on educational quality in large groups of children. School centers will contribute to children's development and learning through meaningful leisure and leisure educators' contribution with a high educational quality. There are a lot of discussions and writings about growing groups of children. How are the leisure education and its quality affected by increasing children's groups? It sparked my interest and therefore I wanted to examine this more closely how it might look in the leisure activities.The aim of this work was to examine leisure educators' perspective on how the educational quality is affected by large groups of children and what is considered of leisure educators' as a high educational quality.To answer my purpose five interviews was made with leisure educators' in different parts of Sweden and also by studying the theoretical foundations and literature for school centers and leisure education.The results of the interviews reveal, among other things, that leisure educators' feel that the large groups of children affects the quality of teaching at many levels.

The European Union is struggling to maintain democracy and tries to increase the participation among the citizens in Europe. The European Citizens? Initiative, ECI, is a platform established by the European Commission to allow citizens to propose new legislation. ?Water and sanitation are a human right! Water is a public good, not a commodity!? is the first ECI that has met the requirements.

Background: Officers in the Swedish Armed Forces educates their soldiers in various skills and arenas. The Officers get their educational training in officer training courses conducted by the Swedish Armed Forces or the Swedish national defence college. The aim of this study was to find out how the cadets, belive that they are formed into educators, their views on the literature being used in the Swedish armed Forsces, and their views on leadership and educational science.Methods: The data for analysis were collected in spring 2010, by use of a questionnaire among cadets studying the tactical/operational program Ta/Op 07/10 at the Swedish national defence college. The respons rate was 69, 6 %.Results: The majority of the cadets thought that experience was the most important factor in becoming a good educator. Most of the cadets also thought that the literature being used by the Swedish armed forces was good, however, few cadets stated that they will use the material for reflection on their own teaching when working as officers.Conclusions: The Cadets had a positive attitude towards the educational philosphy and literature being used, but few will use the literature in reflecting on themselves as teachers.

The aim of this masters thesis is to examine how the educational work of the Swedish public library was regarded in the Swedish library journal Biblioteksbladet at three different periods of the twentieth century, i.e. the thirties, the sixties and the nineties. Using a theoretical framework from the field of professionalization and a methodological framework of hermeneutics, it is shown that the educational work of the thirties can be described as having a focus on free learning whereas the educational work of the sixties can be described as having a focus on public utility. The educational work of the nineties focuses on the information seeking process of the user. It is noted that this development during the century can be understood as a shift of the cognitive authority of the public librarians.

The purpose of this comparative study is to investigate if the views of Sayyid Qutb and Tariq Ramadan regarding social structure and religion are possible to unite with western liberal democracy. The basis of the study is the problematizing approaches written by Qutb and Ramadan regarding the possible unity between Islam and democracy. These problematizing approaches are then tested on the political philosophy of liberalism to see if a unity is possible.The result showed that Qutb's view did not meet the criteria of democracy, which wasn't surprising due to his negative views on the system. However, Ramadan's reformist view on Muslim identity did unite with the views of liberal democracy, though questions regarding the possibility of creating and preserving a European Muslim identity in the secular society were immediately brought to attention.The importance in Qutb's view is social equality, unity and submission to God and the importance of Ramadan's view is to create and preserve a European Muslim identity and adapt to the society where you live and participate as a citizen. Qutb's view will not tolerate diversity and one is to keep or convert to the Muslim faith.

The representative democracy has become weakened during the last decades. At the same time the United Nations declared at the Rio de Janeiro meeting in 1992 that environmental problems can best be solved by involvement of all concerned citizens in decision-making. The main purpose of this study has been to examine if citizens panels is a possible way to involve citizens in environmental decision-making and what the outcomes can be. Furthermore the study has investigated what the participation has contributed to environmental politics and how representative the results have been. This has been carried out by investigating the Piteåpanel in the municipality of Piteå by conducting interviews.The result of the study shows that the involvement of the citizens in the decision-making influenced the environmental politics of the municipality.