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 [...]

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 [...]

In September, someone called from L’Actualité, a weekly magazine based in Montreal, and wanted to interview me about Peer2Peer University. The final article keeps mentioning us in the same sentence as University of the People, whereas I think we are quite different, but it’s great to get the word out to the over one million [...]

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 [...]

As I was walking home tonight, I listened to Migrapolis on my iPod. It’s a Norwegian radio show about multiculture, identity and immigrants. Last week they interviewed the daughter of the “king of the gypsies” in Norway, who never went to school, and grew up to become a drug addict. Finally, she decided to kick [...]

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 [...]

I’ve been aware of Leigh Blackall for a long time, and have found his work and writings consistently very inspiring and interesting. Leigh works for Otago Polytechnic, which is an inspiring example of how an institution can “go open” (see their mini-documentary). I remember emailing him during last Open Education conference, saying that I had [...]

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 [...]

I just finished a blog post about Sean Duncan’s PhD dissertation about reuse of learning objects, which was quite critical. And I asked myself for a second whether I should publish it or not. Would it make anyone upset (him, his supervisors)? Was it aggressive or uneccessary? I don’t think so. I think part of [...]