I’ve long been fascinated by book scanning projects, and written before about OpenLibrary and Universal Library, as well as Google Books. However, as neat as these projects are, we shouldn’t forget sites like Project Gutenberg, which have been around for much longer. Project Gutenberg relies on volunteers to scan, OCR and proof-read texts that have [...]

Background
Back in May 2007, when I attended the World Book Day in Jakarta, I heard about plans to purchase the copyrights for school textbooks, and make the books freely available, to alleviate the problem of students who could not afford to purchase them. I thought it was a very interesting idea, but hoped that they [...]

It’s that time again, when the semester is drawing to a close, and summer is soon upon us (at least those of us with a trimester system, which gives incredibly long summers). This year, it starts even earlier, because we don’t have any exams at OISE. Next week, I am going to CIES in Charleston, [...]

I gave a talk about open education around the world, with Jim Slotta, at the Education Commons/OISE last week. I posted the links for all the different projects mentioned during this talk, and the link to the slides on SlideShare, and even wrote about the process of creating the little Open education videos around the [...]

Background
During the presentation on Open Education around the world at OISE last week, I wanted to really highlight to people the incredible array of resources available, in many different languages. I also discussed three different purposes of openness, direct use (by target audience, usually students), reuse (ie. recontextualized by a teacher or other intermediary before [...]

My institution holds an annual graduate research conference, where all students can present their ongoing research in a friendly and welcoming environment. This is both an opportunity to practice for students who are planning to present at for example CIES or AERA, but also a great opportunity to break down some walls and learn about [...]

I gave a presentation at OISE Education Commons today, together with Professor Jim Slotta, entitled “Open education around the world”. I was very grateful to be invited by Education Commons to give one of their talk, since they only feature one or two each semester. I was also very lucky to be working together with [...]