ASLA mars 09 1 An Inter-university Platform for Sharing and Collaborating in English Studies: Creating SEED (Sweden’s English Educational Database for tertiary education) David Minugh, Mats Deutschmann, Rebecca Hincks, Jean Hudson, Åse Nygren, Philip Shaw 1 1 Academic Networking Networking has always been necessary to scholars, but it is only in the last twenty years that truly rapid asynchronic networking has become feasible for the academic community, only in the last decade for students, and perhaps only in the last five years that such networking has begun to be seen as a natural extension of one’s studies. At the same time, Internet-related activities are an area that is evolving at increasing speed and involving ever more people in various forms of informal networking (witness the growth of e.g. Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, bulletin boards, blogging, and chat sites). Against this background, establishing a dedicated inter-university educational network among active teachers and students of English throughout Sweden seems desirable; this paper describes an attempt to develop such a network called the SEED project. 1.1 Student networking The literature on networking in language teaching is largely concerned with students networking with one another, and an enormous amount of expertise has accumulated over the last twenty years on how networks for co-operative learning can be created for students (for example Kern et al 2008, Kol and Schkolnik 2008, Shin 2006, Fitze 2006, Freedman and Liu 1996, Nguyen and Kellogg 2005, Chun 1994, Riel and Levin 1990). Kern et al 2008 point out that the affordances of electronic networks coincide 1 The authors are affiliated as follows: David Minugh, University of Stockholm; Mats Deutschmann, Mid Sweden University; Rebecca Hincks, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology); Jean Hudson, Malmö University; Åse Nygren, Blekinge Institute of Technology; Philip Shaw, University of Stockholm.