Recently, both Leigh Blackall and Dave Cormier have blogged about OER as the new colonialism, and on both blogs there were lively discussions in the comment sections about what this meant. One of the ideas discussed is that if you try to bring Creative Commons to a context where copyright generally isn’t well respected, you [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Background India is a country that I can never figure out. As striking as the poverty and mismanagement was when I visited it this summer, I am continually struck by the stream of innovation and wonderful initiatives coming from institutions and individuals. I have written earlier about the open access to primary school textbooks in [...]

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 [...]

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 was great being back in Hangzhou, where I spent half a year in 2004. Already, Hangzhou was known as one of the most beautiful cities in China, and the local citizens were very proud of it. Coming back this time, my friend told me of many small changes that in different ways improved the [...]

Below is a brief report I wrote for Rural China Education Foundation, based on my visits to two field sites, where they are experimenting with starting rural school libraries. This report was written for RCEF and based on their needs, and my observations. I am releasing it publicly, because it might offer interesting ideas or [...]