One piece of functionality in researchr that I find myself using quite frequently, is the ability to clip arbitrary amounts of texts from any webpage and send it to a given wikipage very quickly. The way it works is that I select some text (if I don’t select any text, it will just use the page [...]

On February 15, 2012, the Faculty Council at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto formally (and I believe unanimously) passed an Open Access Policy. I believe this is the first faculty at the University of Toronto to pass an Open Access policy. The policy refers to both idealistic reasons, [...]

Two perspectives on Open Access promotion There are two different ways of promoting Open Access publishing to academic authors, and also two different perspectives from which to conduct research. The first is to say that the current system is wonderful, but many people are locked out – academics at smaller institutions, teachers and school administrations, [...]

I began last week to do a “weekly review“, and it seemed like a useful thing to continue. This week, I’ve been at AERA 2012,  so this will be a mix of what I did before I left on Thursday, and some of the notes I’ve taken at the conference (which is still going on [...]

I really intended to focus on my literature review these few weeks, and put Researchr hacking aside, but using it for many hours per day there are always little niggling things you want to fix. And sometimes I get ideas that I just “have to try out”. Researchr is built on DokuWiki, which has worked out [...]

I’ve been really inspired by Ryan Muller’s “weekly reviews” on his blog, and thought for a while that I should try to do something similar. I often feel like time is flying away from me, and that I am not making as much progress as I should with things that matter in my life – [...]

I just wrote about two articles published based on my MA thesis about Chinese Open Courses, and this inspired me to look at some of the download statistics from my website. Back in 2008, I wrote about the idea of a “Fair Trade” symbol for research, and the idea the research ethics shouldn’t stop with the [...]

I released my MA thesis about Chinese Open Courses September 13, 2010, and more than a year later, two journal articles partly based on the thesis have also appeared, one in English and one in Chinese. British Journal of Educational Technology The English article appeared in British Journal of Educational Technology as “Online First” in November 2011. [...]

I recently gave a keynote presentation at ICETC 2011 in Changchun, where I discussed some of the experiences from facilitating the course “Introduction to CSCL” on P2PU, and pointed towards some ideas for technologies and ways of organizing courses that could enable deeper learning in open courses. Open Courses and Informal Learning in a Web [...]

While in Hong Kong attending CSCL, I was surprised to receive an invitiation by Professor Li Luyi at Northwestern Normal University in Changchun to give a keynote lecture at the upcoming International Conference on Educational Technology and Computer. Since I would be participating in the Beijing post-conference and doctoral summer school at the same time, [...]