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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]