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 have been thinking about the issue of “equitable access to governance in globally distributed multilingual organizations” for several years now. That’s a mouth-full, but basically the idea is that you have organizations like Wikipedia, the KDE project (an open-source desktop) or iCommons. Although these kind of organizations are often legally based in the US [...]

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 [...]

In October, University of Toronto participated in the world-wide Open Access Week with a number of different events. I got the honor of starting off with the first event (although I believe there was one event the week before), with a presentation about Innovative projects in the publishing of OER. I’ve always been interested in [...]

I’ve previously written about how I used interwiki links in Wikipedia to extract dictionary information (here and here). After talking with a friend, I got another idea for how I could extract even more dictionary information – localization files. You might know that open source projects like KDE are available in many different languages, translated [...]

I love when different “open” movements can come together and mutually enhance each other, whether it’s using open source software for the production of open educational materials, or using CC-licensed music when creating a CC-licensed documentary. John Willinsky, who recently gave a talk at OISE as part of OA week 2009, has written an article [...]

The electronic publishing and the Open Access movement has led to many different experiments with academic journals. One idea that I found quite interesting is “open peer review” (the Wikipedia article is a good overview). Open peer review could simply mean that the author knows the names of the reviewers, which is not very interesting [...]

So my European travels are drawing towards an end. Lot’s of new impressions to digest, both from the travel, and from ElPub 2009 and OAI6 which I attended. Tomorrow morning I will try to catch a few hours of HackMeeting in Milan, before I fly back to Beijing, spending a few days in Dubai on [...]

SocialLearnLab (or 教育大发现, which is their Chinese name) is a unique online community of students, professors and teachers interested in online education, Web 2.0 and open education. Initiated by Beijing Normal University professor Zhuang Xiaoli (庄秀丽), they run several very active mailing lists, wikis, and use a number of Chinese and international social networking apps. [...]

I was kindly invited by Professor Chang to give a presentation to the department of education at Minzu University of China (formerly called Central University of Nationalities). I never like to give the same talk twice, so although I reused some of the materials from my talk at South China Normal, I redesigned the talk [...]