I don’t know if it’s because I was reading about how Mark Zuckerberg is on a one year challenge to only eat what he kills, or if I was inspired by the speakers at TEDxIBYORK last Friday, but I decided I wanted to do some language learning. Initially, I was thinking about Urdu – it’s [...]

I’ve been waiting for this moment for quite a long time. Living outside of Norway for many years, I’ve always been interested in technologies that enable me to access Norwegian culture from afar. I enjoy reading Norwegian newspapers online, I listen to a few podcasts from the national radio station, I follow some of the [...]

In addition to defining the concept of OER, and introducing a taxonomy of OER projects based on their purposes, I also introduce my theoretical framework from comparative education in the literature review. I begin by describing how international the OpenCourseWare concept has become: At the 2008 Open CourseWare Consortium conference in Dalian, China, representatives from [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I’ve long been fascinated by book scanning projects, and written before about OpenLibrary and Universal Library, as well as Google Books. However, as neat as these projects are, we shouldn’t forget sites like Project Gutenberg, which have been around for much longer. Project Gutenberg relies on volunteers to scan, OCR and proof-read texts that have [...]

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 love seeing material in multiple languages, even languages I don’t understand. As populations have become more diverse around the world, public libraries have risen to the challenge, and whether you visit the Public Library in Oslo, or in Toronto, they have wonderful collections of children and adult books (and often films, DVDs, magazines and [...]