I don’t know if it’s because I was reading about how Mark Zuckerberg is on a one year challenge to only eat what he kills, or if I was inspired by the speakers at TEDxIBYORK last Friday, but I decided I wanted to do some language learning. Initially, I was thinking about Urdu – it’s [...]

I love languages, and linguistic games. I love learning new languages, seeing connections between different languages, because they are in the same language family, or because words were imported for different reasons (religion, trade, etc). For example, there are lots of cognates between Indonesian and Hindi, some come from Sanskrit and were brought into Indonesian [...]

Ever since I began the research on my MA thesis on the Chinese Top Level Courses Project, I was aware that I wanted to get the thesis translated into Chinese. Not only because I believe it’s the only ethical thing to do – when so many people in China have gone out of their way [...]

So far, P2PU has offered courses in English and Portuguese, and we have a growing Spanish community that is hoping to launch several Spanish courses in January. However, from the very beginning, the project has been incredibly international, with volunteers and course participants from all over the world. We’ve also been lucky to get publicity [...]

I have always been interested in Open Educational Resources from around the world, and in my presentations, I do my best to highlight not just MIT and Stanford, but also the amazing contributions from Indira Gandhi National Open University in India, the Virtual University of Pakistan, the open textbooks from Indonesia, the Chinese Top Level [...]

I just came across a new list of the 1000 most visited websites globally, hosted by Google’s AdPlanner. There isn’t too much information about how the list was put together, although it’s noted that certain pages that are not open to the world, spam sites, and porn sites have been removed (it would have been [...]

I am currently listening to the Introduction to Sociology course from the Virtual University of Pakistan, whose video lectures I described in a previous post. The course is taught by Dr. Muhammad Anwar, and curious to find some information about him, I googled his name. I came across this discussion about his course, where former [...]

I find distance universities very fascinating, and have learnt much from my time visiting the Open University of China and Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) in India. Distance universities have been in the forefront of researching alternative ways of delivering instruction and enabling learning, with radio and television, online classes etc. They are also [...]

I am a big fan of Cory Doctorow‘s work. Without planning to, I have actually read his entire oeuvres on screen. If I ever came across a paper copy of one of his books, I would love to pick it up, but I haven’t seen one at the airports I frequent. It started when I [...]

I am always interested in improving my academic “workflow”, new neat tools that can help me keep track of all my notes, PDFs, drafts, citations, etc. I use DevonThink to keep most of my PDFs, and a lot of web pages, as well as most of my research notes. I then transfer these over to [...]