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 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 [...]

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 [...]

Why use Slideshare?A lot of people have began posting their slides to Slideshare for sharing with others. In many ways, Slideshare makes more sense to me than for example Scribd – it’s fairly easy for me to download a PDF and view it in my local viewer, but it’s a pain to have to start [...]

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 [...]

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 Hindi [...]

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 [...]

I was lucky enough to be invited to give a talk at Indian Institute of Public Administration in New Delhi, a research institute that does consulting jobs for the Indian government and also training of senior civil servants. I spoke to a group of perhaps 25 librarians and professors, trying to give a “whirlwind” tour [...]

Background
I somehow came across the homepage of Sarai about two years ago, while living in Indonesia. I was extremely impressed with what I saw from their webpages and mailing lists – a vibrant community space/collective that was interested in many of the same things as me; urban issues in developing countries, open source, open culture, [...]