I have been very interested in the work of Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) for a long time. It’s one of the mega-universities in the world, perhaps the biggest, with close to two million students. I wrote a very excited post earlier about how they have opened almost all of their educational material, and [...]

I have been thinking about the issue of “equitable access to governance in globally distributed multilingual organizations” for several years now. That’s a mouth-full, but basically the idea is that you have organizations like Wikipedia, the KDE project (an open-source desktop) or iCommons. Although these kind of organizations are often legally based in the US [...]

I am just back from Bangalore, where I had the good fortune to participate in the Critical Point of View: WikiWars conference – a critical reflection on Wikipedia from a number of point of views. I will probably write more about some of the most interesting presentations, my own presentation, and other thoughts, but I [...]

So my European travels are drawing towards an end. Lot’s of new impressions to digest, both from the travel, and from ElPub 2009 and OAI6 which I attended. Tomorrow morning I will try to catch a few hours of HackMeeting in Milan, before I fly back to Beijing, spending a few days in Dubai on [...]

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 [...]

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 gave a talk about open education around the world, with Jim Slotta, at the Education Commons/OISE last week. I posted the links for all the different projects mentioned during this talk, and the link to the slides on SlideShare, and even wrote about the process of creating the little Open education videos around the [...]

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 [...]

My institution holds an annual graduate research conference, where all students can present their ongoing research in a friendly and welcoming environment. This is both an opportunity to practice for students who are planning to present at for example CIES or AERA, but also a great opportunity to break down some walls and learn about [...]