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 [...]

I recently left Varanasi for New Delhi, and I am staying in the crazy and dirty backpacker ghetto called Pahar Ganj, conveniently located behind the main train station. Luckily, my hotel has a TV (with some 80 channels), and thus I was able to catch the live broadcast of the opening ceremony of the Beijing [...]

The OpenLibrary I wrote about the OpenLibrary previously, and since then they have only gotten better. They have added a lot of books, but more importantly, their website has turned into a real portal, where you can access all of their scanned books (over 234,000). This is only part of their quest, which is also [...]

Preparing for a talk I am hoping to give in Delhi, I decided to look up the sizes of the Wikipedias in the different Indic languages. There are several ways of assessing the size of a language Wikipedia, none perfect. The most common one is to look at the number of articles, and although this [...]

There are many different milestones when learning a new language. They are important to measure ones progress, especially important since often I am learning independently, and don’t have the crutch of thinking – if I passed the test successfully, then my studies must be on track. But equally or more importantly, they provide a great [...]

Yesterday while looking through the very small adult section in the community library where I am volunteering in Varanasi, I came across a guidebook about Toronto (Toronto: The Unknown City). Although the title is a bit misleading, since it’s more of a conventional guidebook than anything very “unknown” (at least by residents), I still enjoyed [...]

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 [...]

The idea of OpenCourseWare in its current incarnation started with MIT (note that the Wikipedia page I linked to talks as if MIT are the only ones in the world who do OCW – I should update it, but I won’t manage tonight, unless someone beats me to it). They received funding from the Hewlett [...]

I have written about the plan to buy the copyright for textbooks in Indonesia and publish the books online (here, and here). Today I found out, through the excellent Indian book blog Scholars Without Borders that the Indian National Council on Educational Research and Training (NCERT) offers free downloadable versions of many Indian K-12 text [...]