I just came across a newsreport on the Swedish television site (in Swedish) about “top teachers” in Korea. This teachers work at the different cram schools, and their lessons are also filmed and made available online for a subscription fee. Some of these teachers have become virtual superstars, making more than $10 million per year, [...]

From Klaus Graf, via Open Access News, The Royal Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden has digitized more than 656 books in their collection about Aceh, in several languages (Indonesian, French, Dutch, etc). Their website, Aceh Books. This is exciting news for me, since I have found it very hard to [...]

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 [...]

I first went to the annual Comparative and International Education Society conference last year, when it was held at Columbia University. It’s a huge event, with something like 3.000+ attendees, including a very hefty component from OISE, both professors and graduate students. It was great going there only as a participant, and getting the feel [...]

The article below was written for the IFLA Section of Libraries for Children and Young Adults Newsletter, December 2008 (just published), edited by Singaporean librarian Ivan Chew, whose blog I have been reading for a long time, and whom I was lucky enough to meet in Singapore in 2007, while getting a new visa for [...]

During my undergraduate degree in International Development Studies, we had to spend a year working in a developing country, and develop a thesis based on primary research conducted in that country. I spent my year working in Jakarta (for CARE). While there, I came across the phenomenon of community-run libraries, which was extremely widespread and [...]

Caveat
I have spent over one and a half year of my life living in China, and a significantly larger part visiting it, learning the language, watching movies and soap-operas, reading blogs, discussing it with Chinese and non-Chinese, and in general thinking about it. There is still so much I don’t know or understand, but it [...]

The idea of OpenCourseWare in its current incarnation started with MIT (note that the Wikipedia page I linked to talks as if MIT are the only ones in the world who do OCW – I should update it, but I won’t manage tonight, unless someone beats me to it). They received funding from the Hewlett [...]

This mp3 provides much better quality sound, but below you can see the live performance. The lyrics are the same.

sore tugu pancoran
pillar at night at Pancoran (famous area in Jakarta)
si budi kecil kuyub menggigil
the very little guy shivers
menahan dingin tanpa jas hujan
trying to stand the cold without a rain jacket
di simpang jalan tugu pancoran
on the [...]

Perjalanan ini
This travel

Terasa sangat menyedihkan
Feels very sad
Sayang engkau tak duduk
Too bad you are not sitting

Di samping ku kawan
Next to me, friend
Banyak Cerita
Many stories
Yang mestinya kau saksikan
Which you have surely witnessed

Di tanah kering bebatuan
On the dry stone-filled earth
Oh… Oh… Oh…
Tubuhku terguncang
My body gets shaken
Di hempas batu jalanan
By the stony road
Hati tergetar menatap
The heart is shaking [...]