Why do we need theories? At some stage early in my education, I picked up the idea that theory, although perhaps often seemingly too abstract and difficult to understand to be of any use, was important to give meaning to different empirical results, and to provide predictability and transferability to other cases. This was brought [...]

Through Willinsky’s book “The Access Principle“, I came across the site African Journals Online, which is trying to make African journals more visible, and alleviate the problem that many of them are not being indexed in commercial indexing systems like SSCI, and have low visibility both to Western researchers, but also to researchers in other [...]

I’ve posted some great Amharic dance videos earlier, and today I came across Ethiotube.net, a Youtube clone started in February this year and describe themselves in this way: Founded in February 2007, EthioTube is the leader in Ethiopian online video, and the premier destination to watch and share original videos related to Ethiopia worldwide through [...]

I love how Web 2.0 and a lax enforcement of copyrights is making it possible to access cultures from all over the world, I can see Russian TV-shows, and music videos from Ethiopia, things that I could never even buy before (perhaps in Toronto, if you knew exactly where to go, but certainly not in [...]

I have known about Brigit Brock Utne, a professor in international education at the University of Oslo, for several months, since I came across her homepage, which has a very impressive CV and a list of “Where is Birgit in 2006″. Her CV reads like a list of all the things that I would like [...]

Two of my best friends are spending this Christmas in Chad, helping a local youth organisation use open source software (Linux) and donated hardware to produce a youth newspaper. Wojciech Gryc used to be my roommate the first year in Canada, and is annoyingly brilliant (just try to google his name), and Emanuele Fortin is [...]