In 2001, I spent a year teaching English in Wuhan University of Science and Technology. That certainly gave me a first flavor of Chinese university life, but I still understood very little about the Chinese higher education system – partly because that university was a private-public venture, which (at least my campus) seemed to focus [...]

I think it is funny how people often laugh at Youtube and other video sharing sites — sure, you can spend many minutes watching lightsaber-wielding nerds or college students barfing, but you can also find incredible clips that you would have never seen otherwise. These two days, I came across two amazing performances that I [...]

I’ve been aware of Leigh Blackall for a long time, and have found his work and writings consistently very inspiring and interesting. Leigh works for Otago Polytechnic, which is an inspiring example of how an institution can “go open” (see their mini-documentary). I remember emailing him during last Open Education conference, saying that I had [...]

SocialLearnLab (or 教育大发现, which is their Chinese name) is a unique online community of students, professors and teachers interested in online education, Web 2.0 and open education. Initiated by Beijing Normal University professor Zhuang Xiaoli (庄秀丽), they run several very active mailing lists, wikis, and use a number of Chinese and international social networking apps. [...]

I was kindly invited by Professor Chang to give a presentation to the department of education at Minzu University of China (formerly called Central University of Nationalities). I never like to give the same talk twice, so although I reused some of the materials from my talk at South China Normal, I redesigned the talk [...]

Yes, that is the unlikely title of a short film that I collaborated in recording in Hong Kong two weeks ago. To find out why, we have to go way back in time. One day in Toronto, my friend told me about this crazy Norwegian lady who was teaching Cantonese in Hong Kong. We went [...]

This summer, I am spending four months in China, and much of the time will be taken up with my research project (for my MA) on Chinese “OpenCourseWare” (I am gradually realizing that this is not an apt English translation of their program, but I need time to come up with a better one). In [...]

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 [...]

It’s that time again, when the semester is drawing to a close, and summer is soon upon us (at least those of us with a trimester system, which gives incredibly long summers). This year, it starts even earlier, because we don’t have any exams at OISE. Next week, I am going to CIES in Charleston, [...]

Background
During the presentation on Open Education around the world at OISE last week, I wanted to really highlight to people the incredible array of resources available, in many different languages. I also discussed three different purposes of openness, direct use (by target audience, usually students), reuse (ie. recontextualized by a teacher or other intermediary before [...]