The first batch of pictures has been posted, here and here.

I have quite a few more, especially from the village and the primary school, that I will try to post soon.

Stian

I thought I’d write a little more about my last travels. The last time I wrote, I was in Wuhan, and much has happened since that. In China, the 1st of May is celebrated as the workers’ holiday - not with parades and marches of workers demanding their rights like is common in Europe - but with a few days off. Any nationally coordinated holiday in China is a huge logistical challenge, trying to move a few hundred million people who want to get back home - especially rural migrant workers, but also students studying in another city etc. I left for Chonqing on the 2nd of May, and was lucky to be able to upgrade to a hard sleeper at 1AM, because the hard seat section was completely overfilled, and quite uncomfortable.

Chongqing
In Chongqing, I was meeting up with an old student of mine, who has now gone on to become an English teacher herself. I had never been to Chongqing before, but knew that it was one of the cities that had received the most of the relocated villagers from the Three Gorges area, and was growing very rapidly. Later I realized that the Chongqing municipality, with its 30 million people, is probably the largest municipality in the world. The size, though, underlines the problem with defining “the biggest city in the world”, since the boundaries of a city are hard to define - the municipality is the size of Austria, and contains a lot of rural areas. The dense city core itself contains around four million inhabitants.

It’s an interesting city to walk around in, because it’s very hilly - not very common in big Chinese cities. I kind of like hilly cities, because they provide for interesting walks, sudden vistas, crooked roads and so on. In Chongqing’s case, it also provides for a huge amount of big bridges, and a city that often seems “layered” - at one stage we took an escalator a few hundred meters down from one “level” to another (on what was, my friend proudly told me, the world’s longest escalator).

The city was in rapid expansion, with new fancy highrises being built everywhere. We took our afternoon tea in a bizarre rainforest themed cafe, with lush plants, and once every ten minutes the sprinkler system in the middle would erupt, to canned sounds of tropical wildlife. In the middle of the concrete jungle in Chongqing… Then we enjoyed a cable-car ride over the Yangtze river, which is more or less as polluted here as it is when it gets further downstream in Wuhan, but here it’s much thinner.

The Western People Street
Yangrenjie (洋人街), or the Western People Street, is a bizarre fun park in Chonqing, that is still under construction (or at least I hope it’s not done yet). After the cab driver dropped us off, we had to walk for twenty minutes on a very rickety road, before we reached the park, which was packed with people - since it was during the holidays, and it didn’t honestly seem like Chongqing had that many other places worth going on an outing to. There was an upside-down house, with an Indian restaurant in it, lot’s of people selling cowboy hats and sugarfloss (I got a pink one!), some petting horses, a castle, a brick installation that was supposed to look like Manhattan, a ton of outdated slogan signs, “the world’s largest toilet”, and a whole lot of noise. I kept thinking “I hope this isn’t how Chinese really picture a Western street”…

Hechuan
After enjoying Chongqing, we took a one hour bus ride to Hechuan, where my friend’s family lives. I had wonderful food, and it’s always fun to see your friends’ homes. On the second day, my friend had to leave to go back to work, and I staid behind with her parents for another night, because my train wasn’t leaving yet. That night, her parents took me to the street by the river, full of restaurants, where the locals liked to enjoy life in the evenings. We had great food, beer, and once the father had downed two baijiu’s (pretty strong Chinese alcoholic drink) he began talking about philosophy, history and critical thinking. He didn’t care much for Marx he said, but he was a huge fan of Hegel, and his dialectical thinking. I love coming across older Chinese that have lived for a while and have their own ideas and experiences, so I found the conversation very interesting - although my philosophy vocabulary is still a bit limited - I kept looking for the Chinese words for utilitarianism and rule ethics.

Via Beijing
After Hechuan, I left to start my volunteer work with Rural China Education Foundation. I was going to a village in Shandong province, and had to transit through Beijing. So I spent 24 hours on the train to Beijing (was able to upgrade to a sleeper from the very beginning). Most of the time I was lying on my bed, looking at the very mountaineous Chinese countryside outside, and listening to a Swedish crime thriller. Kind of absurd. I arrived at Beijing West station in the morning, bought a ticket to Linqing for that evening, dropped my luggage and went downtown.

I had no real plans in Beijing, and also no travel guide or anything. I decided to head straight for the Tian’anmen square, just because that’s the first place I visited in China back in 2000, and I thought it would be fun to go back. I visited the People’s Great Hall, where the 3000+ people’s representatives gather each year to rubber-stamp government decisions. Then I decided I wanted to go find the new fancy Olympic constructions - the swimming hall and the bird’s nest. At the Tian’anmen metro station, they had a great overview over possible interesting tourist locations and how to go there - which metro station to go to, which bus to switch to.

So I took the metro to a certain station, but there the clues ended - the bus I was supposed to take didn’t exist, and there was no more indication for tourists. Perhaps that will exist before the Olympics. I took a bus that purported to go to some Olympic area, and got off at that station, but could not find what I was looking for. I wandered around for a while, and chanced upon the China Ethnic Minorities Museum, which I decided to visit just for fun. The museum is built after a similar idea of the Taman Mini (Small Garden) in Jakarta, with small areas representing the 56 different official minorities in China. Each area had representative buildings from that ethnic minorities, and some posters describing their lives. There were also dance exhibitions, and souvenirs. The whole was kind of kitschy, although it was interesting to see some of the dances.

The most interesting part, however, was that when I walked over a big “ethnic” bridge, I saw the Bird’s Nest from afar. Finally. I exited the museum, and was finally able to get a good look at both the Bird’s Nest, and the Swimming Hall, that are next to each other. They were still working around them, so I couldn’t get too close, but it was still fun to think that the world’s attention would be focused right here in a few months (when I will be far away, in a small village in India).

One thing that I noticed about Beijing, since I first came there in 2000, is the enormous expansion of the metro system. At that time, I think they only had one or two metro lines, that were very constrained to the inner ring road. It was also much more expensive to ride the metro than the buses, so people still preferred buses, contributing to incredible gridlock in rush hour traffic. During the last few years, they have been building feverishly, especially adding lines up to the Olympics, but also planning ambitiously ahead. Currently, Wikipedia gives the NY subway system, at 370 km, as the largest in the world, with Moscow Metro at 293 km. The Beijing metro is today 142 km, but before the Olympics, a further 58 kilometers of rail will be opened - and before 2012 and 2015 they are adding a number of extra lines. This is incredibly positive, and will hopefully do much to alleviate traffic and pollution, and make Beijing commutes easier.

In the evening, I had dinner with a friend, and left on the late train to Linqing.

Stian

This post is not about what to do to avoid having your backpack stolen in China. Although scare stories about criminality abound in China, I think it’s a lot better than most other places - especially for foreigners. There is undoubtedly a huge amount of scams going around, especially involving cell phones, but that’s a whole different chapter. In fact, in all my time of living and travelling on the cheap in China, I’ve only once lost a camera, and it might just as well have fallen out of my pocket on the bus (seriously).

No, this is about public security, as implemented by the state, and felt by the common man and woman - kind of as a parallel to all the crazy public security measures that have appeared in the US after 9/11.  (The following is just a collection of my musings and observations on a loosely common topic).

Train stations
I have spent a lot of time in train stations, both when living long-term in China, and these last few weeks. Nothing much has changed these last eight years at all. It’s still an incredibly efficient and huge system. Already back in 2000, I thought it was funny that they had you send your bags through an x-ray at the entrance of the train station (only for those actually going on a train, not for going to buy a ticket etc). Of course, the farmers often bring gigantic bags - some of them might be migrant workers literally carrying all their belongings. Not quite sure what they are looking for, they certainly have never pulled me over for some liquids or nail clippers or anything like that.

Today, they actually searched everybody’s bags quite throughly also, including mine, which has never happened before. Not sure if they were worried about something in specific, or if this was simply the result of boarding at a tiny “rural” station, with all the “farmers”.

I think what they are most worried about is explosives, although I’ve barely ever heard about any train exploding. But with the farmers bringing all kinds of stuff, it certainly wouldn’t be surprising if some of them brought a three liter can of petrol, and with all the smoking going on in the corridors… They have huge signs everywhere, even on buses, cautioning people not to bring explosives or flammable material aboard.

I remember once, taking the train from Shenzhen to Wuhan, when we were treated to a half an hour long expose about the kind of dangerous articles we shouldn’t bring on the train, thorugh the train loudspeakers. In typically pedogogical Chinese, which sounds ridiculous when translated: “Travelling friends, you might have noticed the sign saying ‘Don’t bring any dangerous articles onboard’? But what does ‘dangerous articles’ mean? Well, there are 9 kinds. The first kind is knives. What kinds of knives? Well there are…”, and so on.

Tickets
There is no registration of name or checking of ID, neither when buying tickets or when entering the train (in contrast to for example Russia), although I heard that they are considering implementing this to slow down on hoarding of tickets (not sure to what extent this really happens). However, when I took the train from Chongqing to Beijing, for the first time, the train attendant went around with a little very fancy gadget, got everyone’s ID cards, and “scanned them” somehow. She put them on a plate, and clicked a button, and I am not sure if it just read the barcode or actually took a digital picture of the entire ID. Most of the passengers had modern VISA-card size national ID cards, but a few had the older ones, and then she had to enter them manually. She wasn’t even interested in my passport. Not sure what they are using that for - and it only happened that once, I’ve taken several trains after that without that happening.

Your ticket is checked several times during your travel, and it would be incredibly difficult to sneak in without a valid ticket. First, it is checked when entering the waiting room (passing the x-ray machine), although you can buy a platform ticket for a few yuan, to get in. You then sit at the assigned place for your train, often there are several waiting rooms, and in each waiting room there will be several gates. Twenty-thirty minutes before the train is about to leave, the gates open, and you pass through the gates (often several per train), getting your ticket clipped in the process. Usually each gate leads onto only one platform, but sometimes you have to go over a walkbridge, and could theoretically enter different platforms.

Then, if you have an assigned seat or sleeper, you go to that car, and at each car door there is an attendant who checks your ticket again. If you get onto a sleeper, after a while the attendant will come around and exchange all the tickets for tokens. She puts the tickets in a books, with little plastic windows for each bed. This way, she can easily see who gets off where, and can wake you up when you reach your destination in the middle of the night. Then you get your ticket back. This doesn’t happen in the hard seats. I’ve never taken a soft seat, so I am not sure if it happens there. Finally, when you get off at the station, you again have to show your ticket to excit the arrival area.

Hotel registration
Theoretically all hotels should require registration of all guests. In practice this often does not happen. It has happened in the cheapest of hotels, which just includes filling in a form (and a certain amount of head-scratching as you present them with a passport - they are very happy if you just tell them what your Chinese name is). The two main kinds of lodging options in China are hotels and guesthouses (zhaodaisuo - 招待所). The first can range from incredibly expensive, to fairly cheap, whereas the other one is always very cheap (although there is still a range, one can choose from single rooms to shared rooms with 6 people).

During my first time in China I was stopped a few times and told that I was not allowed to live somewhere because I was a foreigner - this was usually at cheap hotels, costing around 60 yuan per night. After that, I have never been stopped, but I am not sure if that is because I go to the cheaper zhaodaisuo, often paying as little as 15-30 yuan per night (or less in the rural areas), or because restrictions have lifted. When I stepped off the train in Linqing at 3 AM, I didn’t show any ID at the tiny guesthouse next to the station, I walked in and asked how much it was, she told me 10 yuan, and I gave it to her. She showed me a room with 5 beds, and I got to bed and slept. During the night, several other passengers came in and went to sleep as well.

Internet cafes
Even when I was living in Wuhan in 2001, some internet cafes required registration. Often they would have a book, where we would have to enter our name - I was usually exempt. This time in China, I have been to a lot of different cities, and gone to internet cafes, and never been asked for ID before today. When I came to the first internet cafe, they wouldn’t let me log on, because they didn’t know how to register my ID card. Then I went to the one next door, and they were happy to let me on - after noting down my passport number.

One thing that has been a frequent topic in China these last years, has been to require “real names” of net users who blog, or sign up for a social website. One problematic result of this is that overseas participants, who obviously don’t have a Chinese ID number, are excluded from these spaces. A friend of mine in Toronto has had this problem on a number of Chinese websites, where he wished to participate.

Conclusion
No conclusion really, just got to think of this after wanting to store my luggage after coming off the train to Hengshui, and together with another traveller being asked to follow the attendant in the private luggage storage shop. It turned out she wanted us to bring the bags through the entrance to the train station, to have them x-rayed, so she could see that there was no problem, before she asked us to take them back to the shop to store them. I thought it was a funny way to piggyback off the security system implemented by the train station. Then, when I was for the first time in a long while denied entry to an internet cafe, because I didn’t have a Chinese ID card, I decided to write this entry. No conclusions about what is necessary or unecessary, just observations.

Stian

I have been planning to blog about the Open Education conference in Dalian for a while, but I have been travelling, and also still digesting my experiences there. I will begin by discussing the organization of the conference itself, and things that future conferences, like the Open Learning conference hosted by COSL in Utah in September, might learn from it. I will write another post about the intercultural experience of a conference with so many Chinese and foreign participants, and then hopefully in a few days I will write more about some of the projects and presentations that were actually given at the conference.

The good stuff
I am going to mention a lot of things that could have been done differently, or better, but I don’t want that to detract from how great the conference was. For me, who has been following the OER movement for quite some time, and recently also began participating online through for example blogging, this was the first time that I actually met most of the actors in person. The general atmosphere at the conference was incredibly positive and welcoming, and without a fail participants - senior administrators and professors at the world’s leading universities - treated a beginning MA student as an equal participant and interlocutor. I learnt a great deal from the many long conversations over the lunch and dinner tables, and I got to know several projects that I will hopefully collaborate with in the future.

All the people responsible for the conference - the international OpenCourseWare Consortium, China Open Resources for Education (CORE), Dalian University of Technology (and their enthusiastic student volunteers), and everyone else - did a great job and I certainly believe that the conference has made a significant contribution to the progress, and especially international collaboration, within the OER movement.

The purpose
To ask how a conference could have been organized better, it’s necessary to know what it is trying to achieve. This is no simple task, because very often large events mean different things to different people. When I participated in the CIES in New York, the purpose was to gather almost 2,000 academics who do research on comparative education, and to allow them to present their papers on (usually) research in progress, to receive feedback from peers. In addition, of course it is a place to network with people who do similar research to you, catch up on the latest books, show yourself off to potential university employers, etc. In that way, the conference itself is more of a platform for a hundred different individual purposes to manifest themselves. In addition, the conference, together with hundreds of other conferences, peer reviewed journals and academic publishers is a part of the academic ecosystem, which aims to stimulate the production, quality control and dissemination of academic knowledge in general (and often forms part of the academic reward system as well).

The Open Translation Conference in Zagreb was very different. It had a clear vision about bringing together users and creators of open source translation software for open content projects, and envisaged some clear deliverables. The conference was built around these deliverables - a mapping exercise of the open translation software space, as well as different translation tool use cases, unconference-style sessions that were designed according to what was needed at each step of the process, with note takers using the Wiki to record information, as well as for example a short film being made with interviews of participants. In this conference, there were no presentations given, papers read, or powerpoints displayed. There was not the usual separation between “the people who present”, and “the people who attend” (except for the one key facilitator that drove the process).

So what is the purpose of the Open Education conference in Dalian? On the one hand it was a general convention of Open CourseWare Consortium members, including elections and legal formalities. On the other hand it was both an academic forum to highlight research on OER and OCW, and a “community of practice”, gathering practioners of OER to share their practices and projects (and tools), come up with common plans, definitions and strategies, and network on future collaboration. The importance of the last aspect is seen clearly from the fact that almost every single person who presented a paper was intimately involved in “doing OER”, there was scarcely a single “disinterested researcher” who did research on the phenomenon because it was an interesting phenomenon and was not simultaneously an advocate.

Layout of the conference
The conference lasted for three days, from the 24th to the 26th. The 24th was the Open CourseWare Consortium day. It started with a great newcomer’s breakfast to introduce some of the vocabulary and definitions that would be useful later in the day. It continues with introductory speeches, and a number of people who did three minute presentations of their challenges to the OCWC community (I spoke about the need for greater focus on learners, and on stimulating more research). Based on these, three strategy breakout sessions were organized. I came late to mine, but I must admit that it did not look to productive, because even by splitting 200 people into three groups, you are still left with groups that are far too large to handle, and with the chairs still in a conference layout, it was just very difficult to get a good discussion going.

The two next days were the actual Open Education conference, and they consisted of roughly four sessions per day, with lunch in the middle, and each session containing perhaps four or five presenters. Perhaps half of the presentations were given by Chinese researchers, in Chinese. There was simultaneous interpretation of the entire conference, and I will talk more about language issues in a later post.

No discussion
One of the most striking parts of the program was that there was absolutely no time set off for discussion after any of the papers presented in the Open Education conference. The only exception is the very last session, where we split into two. Our smaller group had a tiny bit of time at the end, but I think that is because we skipped the official closing ceremony (unintentionally). I’ve rarely ever been to talks that don’t have at least some time for questions, and while in large political talks there are often random annoying people with their own axes to grind, in these kind of specialized communities it is very common that the Q&As are a lot more interesting than the actual papers (and often more applied, and less theoretical as well).

Of course, orchestrating this in a group of two hundred people (although often far from all were present) is also quite difficult. It might have been a lot easier if we split up in two or three sessions for the entire conference. The downside is that you don’t get to hear all the talks (although hopefully they will all be well represented in the proceedings), but you get smaller groups and much more time for discussion. I think this is doubly important in such an international conference, where you have people from all kinds of national and institutional contexts with their different things that are “given”, but might be a lot less than obvious for outsiders. (An example is Fun-Den Wang’s quick and impromptu explanation of the “China Quality OCW” or 精品课程, a topic that is well known to all Chinese present, but not to many of the foreigners. Unfortunately this explanation, given in Chinese, was not translated by the interpreters who just got the feed from the speaker’s microphone, and thus did not help a whole lot.)

The China Quality OCW is also a project that it would be very interesting to be able to discuss - not just listen to presentations about. While it represents an incredible commitment from the Chinese Department of Education and has made available a large amount of very useful resources, it is not placed under open licenses, and it cannot thus really be called OCW. I know that several of the non-Chinese researchers I talked to were curious about this, and would like to know whether this was being worked on, etc, but didn’t have a chance to ask.

Radically changing the format?
So far I mentioned some ways the presentation of papers could have been improved - perhaps several sessions concurrently, certainly more time for presentation, etc. However, a pertinent question is whether organizing a conference as a series of papers to be read and commented upon is really the ideal format. This question is becoming more and more relevant in this age of digital collaboration and sharing. With flying being so expensive and environmentally damaging, physical time spent together ought to be optimized by doing things that can best be done when physically in the same room - and other things ought to be done for example through online communication. Some presenters might have such a presence that witnessing their speech live feels like a great event - yet this is rare, and luckily researchers are not selected based on their stage presence, but on their analytical capabilities.

Thus, I feel that I would have lost very little by reading the papers in the proceedings before the conference started - or even watching some of the presentations online. If this was the case, we would have been able to use the time together on discussion, questions and answers, and structured interaction. A particular reason why this is important in the OCWC case is the fact that the participants are so international, and come from very different backgrounds. In this case, the informal networking over lunch and dinner that is often the lifeblood of conferences might not be enough, because the different networks too easily sit together - which could be easily observed - whether grouped by country or common language. The American researchers that share a common framework, read each other’s blogs, and have met each other at previous conferences have an easy tone, and the Chinese professors might feel much more comfortable with their peers. Thus there is an important need for structured opportunities for cross-community interaction and networking.

This could include time for an unconference aspect, where people who want to run a session write it up, and people who want to participate come (this of course requires the use of more breakout spaces, although there were ample common spaces that could have been used). The iSummit in Dubrovnik did something similar during the pre-conference for the learning track, where two other participants and I identified a common interest in the future of universities, and did a two hour session on the p2p university - which has informed my thinking until today, and might lead to papers and projects in the future. This was never on the conference program before coming to Dubrovnik. Similarily there might be real topics of interest between different groups that occur during the conference, and it would be great to have a semi-structured space to deal with that.

Another activity, which I was introduced to in Dubrovnik as well, is speed geeking. AspirationTech describes it like this:

A tongue-in-cheek rip off of the speed dating concept, SpeedGeeking offers a fully immersive, invigorating and hilarious approach to meeting people … and learning about the cool projects, software tools and crazy ideas that they have been working on. At a SpeedGeek, one group of participants sets up at stations around a room to give 5 minute presentations while the rest of the group migrates in a circle around the room to hear these high-speed raps. The result is an obscene amount of fun, all tied up with a good dose of learning about how technology is being used for social change.

This would be brilliant because so many of the papers were about innovative services, tools, videos, websites etc that projects had developed - but we want to see them! Don’t tell me about Connexions, show me. This is doubly relevant for projects that are in other languages - it might be hard for me to play around with the semantic search tool from Japan, but if someone showed it to me, I might begin to appreciate how I could use this in my own project.

(Note that this would have required better internet access, which was a problem throughout the conference).

Final thoughts
These are just some thoughts about how the conference could have been reworked to yield even better outcomes. I also think some kind of a collaborative activity to yield some kind of common output would have been great. Wouldn’t have to be a manifesto, but perhaps a Wikipage listing all our different projects, or a Connexions course on how to research OpenCourseWare or… And this leads into my final thought: documentation. I received on the first day of the conference a book with the proceedings, which is great - but I sincerely hope this will be made available online, and well visible. I also wish that all the proceedings had been CC licenses, as it is, I saw no references to open licenses in the book. This is the case for the Open Learning conference in Utah, which is great.

Most of what I wrote above talks about the conference in general terms, as an international conference with participants from around the world, but does not deal much with the divide between the Chinese participants and the others - these are integrated topics, but this post is long enough, so I had to divide it. I hope to write another post on that soon, but first I have to catch a 16 hour hardseat train to Chongqing.

It was a great conference, and the above is intended as positive and constructive critique or ideas for how to make the next conference even better, more useful, and more productive to the entire OER movement.

Stian

One of the most striking things in China, and a very important feature for foreigners, is the ubiquitous cybercafes. I made heavy use of them the first time I was living in China, in 2000-2001, when I had no internet at “home” (in the student dormitory). The second time, when I was living in Hangzhou, I had broadband internet at home, but still used them occasionally. And of course, on this trip, all my surfing has been done through cybercafes. They have changed extremely little since 2001, which is interesting for a technology that is in so rapid development. Here are some superficial thoughts (based only on own experiences, not on any study or external sources).

Description
You can find cybercafes in any city in China, however they almost never have English signs (why would they?). Most of them are called 网吧 (wangba) or internet bar, but some have more innovative names. Usually there is a sign on the street and a staircase leading to a basement, or the second floor of a building. Once you enter, it’s a very large room that might hold 100-200 computers. Near the entrance is a desk, which also sells snacks and cold drinks. There are many signs at the entrance about people under 18 not being allowed access, and there are rules about the minimum distance between schools and cybercafes.

I don’t have membership at any cybercafe, so I go to the desk, pay 10 RMB deposit, and receive a card with a username and a code. Regulars have their own accounts, and don’t need to “check in” like this. In recent years, internet cafes are supposed to check your ID and write down your details before letting you log on. I am not sure how much this is enforced - since I am a foreigner they mostly don’t bother, although one or two has asked to see my passport.

You can then choose any computer. Two things have changed slightly since 2001. Firstly, the computers are turned off between customers, probably to save electricity (often the occupancy is far under 100%). I am guessing there might have been some central edict about this, because it never was the case before, and now it has been at every single place I visited. So I choose a location, turn on the computer, which boots Windows XP (in a few cases Vista). All the cafes use a cybercafe management software to deal with login and accounting. I type in my password and get the Windows desktop. Often number of icons are limited etc.

Not a single cybercafe I have visited so far had Firefox, which is very frustrating. I can’t remember the last time I had to use Internet Explorer for any extended amount of time. This should be a huge opportunity for some Chinese open source advocacy group - we are talking potentially hundreds of millions of new users here!

The computers are all stand-alone tower computers, with fairly large screens, and headphones (sometimes headsets). It’s interesting that they never experiment with multi-head computers, but one of the reasons (apart from the fact that they are running Windows) could be that the computers are frequently used for gaming. Many cybercafes seem to have disabled the USB drive, which is very frustrating, when trying to write an article on your laptop, and post it online at the cybercafe.

Internet access
The one who can understand China’s internet policy will get a prize from me - it’s highly erratic. Generally speaking, they block far more Chinese controversial webpages, than English ones, however there seem to be a lot more pages blocked this time than the last time I was in China. Often whole newspapers, or whole blog hosts are blocked for just one article/blog. This is the advantage of having your own domain I guess (reganmian is still not blocked). Worse than that, using foreign Web 2.0 applications is very slow - I could not manage to play a video on Youtube, even though it did display, and GMail is highly erratic, Meebo and other IM clients don’t work at all. Of course, China has a huge amount of Web 2.0 applications themselves, and they all load very fast. The advantage of having people post their pictures, videos and blogs on Chinese sites, is of course that the government has much more fine-grained control with this.

Users
Almost all users are young males, with the occasional female. This probably depends a lot on where it is located - at the cybercafes near the university where I taught, the gender balance was a lot more equal. Generally the environment is quite “male friendly” - dark, very smoke filled (there is an ashtray next to every computer), and often noisy. The two main activities are playing online games (Counterstrike was the most popular back in the days, not sure what is hot these days), and watching videos online. People who play online games can be quite noisy, shouting into their headsets, and to their friends on the next row over.

Local services
An interesting detail is that cybercafes also provide local storage of popular media - to save bandwidth and offer better service. There is often an icon on the frontpage to a page hosted on 192.168.x.x (local server, not available on the internet), with fancy webpages offering access to hundreds of movies, TV shows, music etc. This is all for watching online. I just watched a two hour German movie about a huge fire in a tower, the quality was quite good. Since the webpages are so professional, I am assuming that there is a company that designs these local media solutions and sells/rents them to the internet cafes, it would be interesting to know how this works - how it gets updated etc. (Of course, it wouldn’t stand very long against the copyright police).

Pricing and economy
The price of going online hasn’t changed since 2001, although the price of food has almost doubled. It’s still usually 2 yuan per hour (30 cents with today’s exchange rates). Some cafes actually have one row of computers that only offer games, and the local media server, at a cheaper rate. I think - but have no evidence for this - that the cafes are usually individually owned. At least, I have never seen any evidence of any chains. There is very little differentiation except for in Beijing and Shanghai, where you might find more upscale, and cleaner cafes, for more money. The initial investment for hundreds of computers capable of gaming must be huge, and I wonder how quickly the recoup it. One important detail is that the cafes usually stay open 24 hours a day (labor is very cheap, so it makes sense to exploit the capital). Students at my university would often stay up all night, because it was the only place girls and boys could hang out together - the dormitory closed it’s doors at 11, and girls could never go to visit boys rooms. There was a special rate from 11PM to 7AM.

Final thoughts
I wonder how the market for internet cafes is developing. The very specific target group makes it clear that many people access the internet from other places. One factor is that it has become very much more common to get broadband internet at home, and I wonder if many universities now offer this in dormitories too (I don’t know about the last one). Even in my friend’s apartment building, where rooms cost only 40$ per month and are absolutely tiny, with no amenities (no hot water, heating, etc), there are many who have broadband internet (I saw notices posted on the wall). Others access it through teir office. As far as I know, wireless internet access is still very rare, but this might be changing - and is probably very different in Beijing and Shanghai.

Stian

I absolutely love Chinese bookstores. They are often huge, and buzzing with activity. The biggest are often called “book cities”, and the one I visited in Shenzhen a year ago was about six huge floors. On the Sunday that I visited it, it was packed with people, sitting on everywhere voraciously reading. A big difference between Indonesian bookstores is that in China, the books are almost never wrapped in plastic, and it is totally accepted to spend hours sitting in the bookstore reading books.

When buying any book, but in particular when buying a book in a language that I am still learning, it’s very important to me to be able to look through the book and see the contents, and the level of the language. In Indonesia, I often had to surreptiously take the wrapping off books, without the attendants noticing, so that I could examine the contents (everyone did this), but in China you can collect a few books that look interesting, sit in the window sill, and spend a leisurely half an hour looking through to determine which you would like to buy.

The range of books is amazing, and almost absolutely everything is in Chinese, of course. There are usually extremely few English books, except for a few out-of-copyright bilingual versions (Wuthering Heights, etc) for language learners. (I wonder if CC China could work with publishers to publish bilingual versions of some modern CC licensed novels? It ought to be a lot more interesting for the young English learning audiences to read Cory Doctorow novels, than Gone With the Wind… Not sure if he is using non-commercial though).

English-language intro to Chinese ideologies?
I always find it interesting looking around in the government section, with lot’s of training material for government exams for people who want to work at different levels - this of course includes political exams. I thought it was very fascinating, the first time I came to China, to see their extensive multiple choice exams on Marxism for example.

One thing that I have thought before, and which I was reminded of looking through the political books is this: Are there any books in English at all which attempt to explain the ideologies of China? I remember when I first lived in China, wishing that I could one day meet a Chinese who was a convinced communist, or convinced of the ideology of the party, and could really explain to me. I wouldn’t even try to argue - just listen and try to understand.

Because for someone who knows at least a little bit of Marx, and has been active in left-wing political parties in Norway, where this was discussed, it is very interesting to see how China’s ideologues can justify China’s current development. Once again - I am not trying to attack or ridicule, but rather to understand. I know that in Chinese there is a huge amoung of ideological training material, political philosophy books etc, but the language is quite confusing, especially for someone who didn’t go through political education in high school and university.

With the increasing importance of China, you’d think that it would be important to really try to understand these ideologies for Westerneras. Even if most Chinese might not actually believe in them, they still function as the official guidelines of the government, and are still taught to hundreds of millions of people every year in schools and workplaces.

New developments
The bookstore I visited in Dalian was quite similar to what I remembered from 7 years back, but there were two new developments. One was a number of Lonely Planets in Chinese. I am quite sure these did not exist back then, and they are an interesting indicator of the greater wealth of Chinese, and thus the much larger group of Chinese who are able to travel overseas. As well - how many choose to, and are able to do so, independently - because a Lonely Planet is not that useful, if you are on a tour bus the whole time.

I am wondering whether the content is simply the normal Lonely Planet translated, or whether there is stuff added/edited to suit a Chinese audience (Chinese restaurants?). I also wonder whether most of the people who buy them are actually going to backpack overseas, or whether it’s also bought by people who like to dream about doing so. (I’ve certainly enjoyed reading the Lonely Planet for India long before I actually got a chance to go there).

The other thing I noticed was a series of Chinese-language graded readers for Chinese learners. This is a brilliant development, which might be very useful for students of Chinese. The introductory text explained that they had produced 60 titles, with different levels of difficulty. The easiest books only use the 300 most common words in Chinese (not sure how many characters this corresponds to), as well as introduction 1-2% of new words that are glossed at the bottom of each page. There are also introductions to each story in the beginning, to set the context. The most advanced books include up to 5000 words (or characters?).

I am a huge believer in getting people to “break the reading code” in Chinese as early as possible, and I think these graded readers can be a very useful tool. I really hope that Chinese institutions around the world will stock up on these - they certainly are not expensive.

Stian
(PS: I wrote this a few days ago on my laptop, but this is the first internet cafe that actually would read my USB key and let me post it).

While being back in mainland China is already a great experience, and I really enjoyed all my time in Dalian and the few hours in Beijing–coming back to Wuhan is still a special event. I spent a year teaching in Wuhan Scientific and Technical University in 2000-2001, and it’s the city where I first got my feet wet in China. It was a challenging, but wonderful year, and Wuhan will always hold a special place in my heart. Suffice to say that one of their most famous local dishes, which you cannot get anywhere else in China, is called hot dry noodles, or in Chinese: reganmian (热干面). I had a serving of that this morning, and it was just as I remembered it.

I have spent today walking around in Wuchang, just enjoying the incredible hustle and bustle, the millions of small shops, tiny workshops, the sidewalks that often are two car-lanes wide, the crazy traffic, the smell of coal and fried dough, the old guys playing chess on the street. I have visited Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore (not yet Taiwan - though I’d love to!), but somehow in my mind nothing beats mainland China. And in mainland China, nothing beats Wuhan. It’s dirty and polluted like nothing else, the traffic is insane, you can seldom see the Yangtze river when riding a bus over the ain bridge over it, people swear and spit and shout in a dialect of Mandarin that is almost incomprehensible, but I somehow love it. It’s got an incredible energy, and some kind of “raw urbanism” that I missed intensely in the sprawling slum areas of Jakarta.

Nobody owns a house in Wuhan (or most Chinese cities) - there are no single-dwelling houses. Everyone has an apartment, whether in an eight storey creaking apartment block with edges and windows and laundry hanging everywhere, or a smooth newer building. Almost nobody own their own car - there is not a single parking lot here (thank god!). My friend lives in a tiny studio apartment, with a simple toilet and kitchen, and pays 230 RMB a month ($32 USD). When she walks into the street she is in the middle of busy restaurants, and there are five buses stopping in front of her apartment. I’d take that over a bigger apartment on a highway in Scarborough any day of the week!

What has changed?
China changes so fast that it’s almost impossible to keep up, and I was very curious when coming back to Wuhan if I’d notice any changes, 7 years after I lived here (I was back for a week in 2004). The truth is - not much. (Of course, Beijing, for example, has been developing much faster). There seem to be more air-conditioned buses, and there is more advertising around. Many of the buses have plasma screens that show advertising all the time, as well as as a scrolling marquee sign that lists kind of “classified ads” (more informative, about events, prices of surgery at the local hospital, and exhortations to look to both sides when crossing the street). None of these carry any information about where the bus will stop next etc (but most buses make voice announcements). A lot of the taxis even have a scrolling marquee sign in the back window facing out, with ads.

The Wuchang train station was torn down, and on the other side of the street, they are almost finished building a new one, that is huge and very fancy. I already mentioned that there seems to be more limitations on internet usage (at least in internet cafes), and I have problems using GMail for example, not to mention Meebo or other foreign webpages. This might be a temporary problem leading up to the Olympics.

Food prices have seen a huge increase to almost the double, since 2004. This is notable especially since from 2001 to 2004 there was no difference at all. Fried lamian now cost 10 yuan, up from 5. Reganmian never cost more than 1.2, now cost 2.5. A plate of suanla tudousi (hot and sour potato stripes) used to cost 3-5, now often 8. Partly this is probably due to the international rise in food prices. If calculated in terms of Norwegian Kroner (NOK) though, the rise isn’t so big, because the yuan has lost value to the NOK (in 2001 it was almost at parity, now it’s 0.7 yuan to one NOK).

I am planning to blog quite a bit about the conference, but not sure when I get a chance. Internet cafes are a bit annoying, very noisy, dark, smoke-filled, with poor keyboards, only Internet Explorer, and frequent timeouts of foreign websites. And most seem to have disabled the USB drives (to avoid people to load viruses I guess), so I cannot even upload an article I wrote on my laptop. But I will try to get it posted later.

Stian

My last week in Toronto was quite hectic, with finishing up a thesis, grading 80 exams, moving out of my apartment and temporarily suspending my life in Toronto. I watched some great movies on the plane over, although it was a long trip, and it made me think again that people who fly across the ocean twice a month are probably to be pitied rather than admired.

China

It was a great feeling being back in China after so long. I lived here for a total of one and a half years, but apart from a few days in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, I haven’t been back properly since 2004. Luckily, I have more or less kept up with my Chinese through Chinese friends, living near Chinatown in Toronto, and copious amounts of soap operas.

I spent half a day in Beijing, meeting up with a friend who had gotten me a train ticket, and having my first meals in China - although since these were close to the train station, they were more up-scale than I am used to. Delicious though. Also realized, when I tried to explain to my friend about OpenCourseWare and Creative Commons licenses in Chinese, that I lack some relevant vocabulary.

I took the train to Dalian over night, and loved being back on a Chinese train. Their train system is amazing, ferrying millions of people every day with unwavering efficiency and professionality. I slept well on my upper berth, after some conversation with the people in my car. It was the first reminder of Chinese dialects - most of my friends in Toronto speak Mandarin as their second language, because they come from other regions in China, and thus their Mandarin is very standardized and easy to understand. But in Northern China, where “Mandarin” is spoken, you get all kinds of versions. Kind of like learning Oxford English, and then going to Texas. I understand it, but certainly have to pay a lot more attention. Fun though.

Dalian

I have never used CouchSurfing or Hospitality Club in China before, indeed, last time I lived here, they didn’t exist. It has proven to be a wonderful way of connecting to people where I have travelled - for example in Indonesia. In Dalian, I knew that I did not want to stay at the official conference hotel, because it was so expensive (and also), and I was planning to just find something close to the train station, a zhaodaisuo that was cheap. However, I wasn’t sure how easy this would be (in some Chinese cities it’s very difficult, in others you need to know where to go), so I tried contacting some CouchSurfers in Dalian before I left, and got an overwhelming response. I was slated to live with one of them, and looking forward to it. However, when I finally found the conference hotel, it turned out that it was far away from downtown, and it would take a lot of time to travel to my host - especially since some of the public transport doesn’t run after 8PM. Luckily, I found a very nice and clean hotel for 60RM close to the conference hotel.

And it’s on a beautiful street - with a lively market during daytime, and a great shaokao (Chinese bbq) in the evening. Different vegetables (and meats - but not for me) on a stick, pick the ones you want, they sprinkle them with crazy spices and bbq them for you - you eat them on ridiculously low chairs, drinking local beer (3 RBM/half a liter). I love this way of eating, and had missed it a lot since 2004. There was also a tiny printshop next to my hotel, and I had them print up 100 business cards for me, with Chinese and English text, for 20 RMB.

Quick reactions to China?

Well, I love being back! love walking the busy streets, buying a local newspaper, sitting down for a morning meal of “fried oily ones” (youtiao)  and hot sweet soymilk on the street at 5:30 in the morning, while all the workers are on their way to work. I love taking buses, streetcars, figuring out where to go, talking to everyone (a half an hour conversation with a three-wheel driver from the station, about Russians in Dalian, food prices and the Olympics).

Internet cafes are still as cheap as they were, also sadly as dark and smoke-filled. Just now, a guy sat down right next to me and began playing online Chinese chess, and smoking like a furnace. Usually they only have Internet Explorer, which is a pain, but this time I actually downloaded Firefox and installed it. There seems to be a lot more blocked pages now than last time I was in China, but maybe my surfing pattern is different. Quite a few of the blog posts linked to from my Google Reader are blocked (not about China - probably the whole blog provider is blocked), as well as several foreign news organizations. Of course, Wikipedia (luckily, I have a few language versions offline). I also had some problems with Gmail in Internet Explorer, which were resolved when I went through google.com/ig, however it seems to be OK in Firefox.

Tomorrow I leave for Wuhan for a few days, then Chongqing, and finally Guozhuang for a few weeks.

Stian

Just a quick update on my plans for the summer. I am leaving on Monday for Beijing and Dalian, to participate in the OpenCourseWare Consortium conference on Open Educational Resources, organized by CORE and Dalian Technical University. Then I will visit some old friends and ex-students from the time I taught in China, and spend about three weeks working with Rural China Education Foundation in a village called Guozhuang in Shandong province, looking especially at their fledgling rural library project and seeing if I can contribute with some of my (limited) experience from Indonesia.

Then I am off to Varanasi, via Hong Kong and New Delhi. I have been studying Hindi this whole year, and was looking for an excuse to go to India this summer. Through my research on community libraries in Indonesia (I’ll post about that as soon as the translation is done), I came across World Literacy Canada and their gumpti library project in villages outside of Varanasi. I will do some intensive Hindi classes, and conduct a research project with Dr. Michael Kevane, who has done much research and activism around rural libraries in Africa, and is the head of Friends of African Village Libraries. Together we will try to design a research project that can qualitatively begin to tell us how people are using these gumpti libraries, who are using them, how they fit into rural life, etc. Ideally, we will end up with both a good piece of academic research that can be published, and a report to World Literacy Canada with concrete suggestions for improvements.

And I will be back in Toronto on September 4th, ready to begin my Master in Higher Ed at OISE.

I am not quite sure what will happen to this blog during the summer. I will have sporadic access to the internet, and I would like to keep it up to date. I might post some travel entries that are more personal than what I usually do (like when I did the Greyhound trip in the US). I am also hoping to be able to blog from the OpenCourseWare conference for example - but no promises. Keep the feed in your reader though, I can guarantee that I will be back this fall with lot’s of thoughts and reflections on higher education, open educational resources, and other random stuff that matters.

Have a great summer.

Stian

(PS: If you are in Beijing, Dalian, Hong Kong, Chongqing, Wuhan, Delhi or Varanasi, and would like to meet up - you know what to do).

Weng Diedie is a Chinese filmmaker who has spent several years visiting the matrilineal Mosuo tribe in South-Western China, and filmed a fascinating and beautiful tale of how their traditional music is threatened by tourism and modernization. She has already shown it to full houses at many different venues in the US, and now she is collecting funding to go back to Mosuo. From her website:

In the spring of 2009, Weng plans to collaborate with local Mosuo cultural centers to screen her recently finished documentary “Mosuo Song Journey” at different Mosuo villages and hold discussions on the topics related to cultural preservation. All the money from selling this DVD will contribute to the cost of this continued Mosuo song journey.
As this trip happens, Weng will keep you posted with her screening and discussion events through words, pictures and videos online: http://butterflybutterfly.info/mosuo_song_journey/

Watch the trailer below, go to her website, and you can order the DVD for just 20$. All the funds go to support Diedie’s return to Mosuo this summer, and if there is anything left over, they will go to future film projects.

Stian