This weekend, I have three couchsurfers from Argentina staying with me, and I’ve been practicing my Spanish a lot. It’s quite rusty, but it’s fun, and we have had some great conversations. This evening, my roommate joined us, and all five of us were sitting around the table platicando. We talked about Toronto, and all [...]

I think it is funny how people often laugh at Youtube and other video sharing sites — sure, you can spend many minutes watching lightsaber-wielding nerds or college students barfing, but you can also find incredible clips that you would have never seen otherwise. These two days, I came across two amazing performances that I [...]

Yes, that is the unlikely title of a short film that I collaborated in recording in Hong Kong two weeks ago. To find out why, we have to go way back in time. One day in Toronto, my friend told me about this crazy Norwegian lady who was teaching Cantonese in Hong Kong. We went [...]

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 [...]

I spent a year studying in Sweden, and really enjoyed getting to know better our neighbour, that Norwegians always make fun of (they tell us the same jokes back, with Norwegians in the stupid roles, so it works both ways). I love the Swedish language, and often read Swedish novels, or download audiobooks (my latest [...]

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 [...]

Weng Diedie is a Chinese filmmaker who has spent several years visiting the matrilineal Mosuo tribe in South-Western China, and filmed a fascinating and beautiful tale of how their traditional music is threatened by tourism and modernization. She has already shown it to full houses at many different venues in the US, and now she [...]

My friend Peder noted that this phenomenon was preceded by a film by Woody Allen, which took this to the extremes. I will copy and paste from the Wikipedia article: What’s Up, Tiger Lily? is the first film directed by Woody Allen. He also wrote and appeared in this 1966 comedy, which utilized clips from [...]

This entire summer, NRK2, one of the state TV channels in Norway, have been broadcasting Bollywood movies every Friday night. To me, this was a real treat. Although I don’t enjoy every singly Bollywood movie (how could I, when they produce over 900 per year?), I seem to me more receptive to them than many [...]