Summer plans, from Dalian to Varanasi
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).
