My recent posts have dealt with my departure from Bremen (over one year ago) and with my memories of political changes in Germany. In addition to this it is appropriate to share some memories of the good time that I have had with the Finnish expatriate communities - both in ...

This year the University of Bremen is celebrating the 5oth anniversary of the start of the university activities. From German perspective this is not much - many of the older universities have been founded by the feudal patrons (Kurfürsten) centuries ago. And therefore they have been named by these founding ...

Yesterday, on Monday 19.01.2021 our American friends celebrated  Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday. This reminded me of a blog that I wrote four years ago on the important travels of Martin Luther King Sr and Jr (father and son) to Germany. Both visits had consequences and it ...

In my latest blog posts I have been closing my activities as a project-based researcher. In addition, I have made a brief review on different phases of my career with European research & development projects in the field of vocational education and training (VET). This has been part of my ...

Today we heard the sad news that our former colleague (and long-time Visiting fellow of our institute ITB) Hans-Dieter Höpfner has passed away. To me this is striking, since I have just blogged about the historical events of 1989 (when the political system of former DDR collapsed) and of 1990 ...

In my previous post I shared some memories of my study visit to Germany in October/November 1989. However, I didn't write the post primarily as a report of the study visit (with an account of my conversations at different stations). Instead, I wanted to give a picture, how I experienced ...

During the whole October and the beginning of November I have been hearing German broadcasts and watching German TV documents that revisit the historical events thirty years ago. Altogether these revisit the turning points - die Wende - in the history of the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik - ...

I started a series of blog posts by mentioning that we celebrated the Europe-Day on Thursday, the 9th of May, here in Bremen. Then, In my first post I explained the background of the Europe-Day and then reflected on two periods of my career as a European researcher in vocational ...

In my previous blog I started from the fact that we had just celebrated the Europe-Day on Thursday the 9th of May. That led me to think about the origins of present-day European Union and about the community-building initiatives that brought it into being. This led me to think about ...

Yesterday, the 9th of May, we (citizens of Bremen) celebrated Europe. As we know, the European Union has chosen this date as the Europe-Day. The background is that on this very day in 1950 the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman gave speech in which he outlined a plan to create ...