I have been thinking a lot about what would be the ideal file format for for example dissertations. The dissertations category is a nice example, because the institutions have basically complete control – they can ask you to do whatever they want, to graduate, and you will do it. For example, my institutions require that [...]

I really enjoy giving presentations and talks. They are a great way for me to think through my ideas, and systematize them, and I can trace some of my ideas now through a series of talk as they were gradually developed (with help from the audience). I try to be an interesting and engaging speaker [...]

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 [...]

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 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 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 [...]

After I wrote my last blog post about how many Open Access journals have confusing or contradictory licensing information, I sent a brief e-mail to the e-Century Publishing Corporation. They publish The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Pathology, which I used as an example in my blog post. The blog post was really about [...]

I’m currently doing some surveying of the Open Access publishing landscape, together with a professor. We are trying to get a sense of the different actors, motivations, etc. We will be sharing much more from this research as it matures, but for now, I wanted to mention one thing that has come up frequently. I [...]

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 [...]