I am currently listening to the Introduction to Sociology course from the Virtual University of Pakistan, whose video lectures I described in a previous post. The course is taught by Dr. Muhammad Anwar, and curious to find some information about him, I googled his name. I came across this discussion about his course, where former [...]

I find distance universities very fascinating, and have learnt much from my time visiting the Open University of China and Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) in India. Distance universities have been in the forefront of researching alternative ways of delivering instruction and enabling learning, with radio and television, online classes etc. They are also [...]

Stephen Downes recently gave a talk in Argentina (at the same time as I hosted a group of wonderful Argentinians in my home). The talk is very good at outlining some basic ideas around connectivism, the difference between networks and groups, and how learning happens. Even though I have followed his writings for a while, [...]

This weekend, I have three couchsurfers from Argentina staying with me, and I’ve been practicing my Spanish a lot. It’s quite rusty, but it’s fun, and we have had some great conversations. This evening, my roommate joined us, and all five of us were sitting around the table platicando. We talked about Toronto, and all [...]

I am a big fan of Cory Doctorow‘s work. Without planning to, I have actually read his entire oeuvres on screen. If I ever came across a paper copy of one of his books, I would love to pick it up, but I haven’t seen one at the airports I frequent. It started when I [...]

I am always interested in improving my academic “workflow”, new neat tools that can help me keep track of all my notes, PDFs, drafts, citations, etc. I use DevonThink to keep most of my PDFs, and a lot of web pages, as well as most of my research notes. I then transfer these over to [...]

There are lot’s of exciting open projects coming out of India, and I was very excited some time back to discover that the National Council of Education Research and Training had put hundreds of K12 books in several languages online. It was fun looking at a first grade textbook in Hindi, or a 12th grade [...]

I am very interested in book scanning projects, and especially in making books in different languages available to the world. I’ve written before about my enthusiasm around the OpenLibrary project, and also my wish to find out more about the process/get involved. Since then, there have been many improvements in interface, additions of new books [...]

I am trying to purchase a flight ticket, but because I am an international student, my credit limit is just 1000$, and the ticket costs 1,150$. The fact that I have over 10,000$ in my account is not important, I can’t seem to buy this ticket. Since I have been a customer of CIBC‘s for [...]

After I wrote my last blog post about how many Open Access journals have confusing or contradictory licensing information, I sent a brief e-mail to the e-Century Publishing Corporation. They publish The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Pathology, which I used as an example in my blog post. The blog post was really about [...]