In this post, I will introduce the development of OpenCourseWare projects in three Asian countries that are close to China both geographically and culturally. I will later use these examples to show why it was easy for foreigners to misunderstand the developments within China. Japan Already in 2002, researchers from the National Institute of Multimedia [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
