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 [...]

Introduction I’m fascinated by the idea of measurement itself having an effect on behavior. For example, it has been show that simply letting people see how much electricity they are using at any given time, leads people to decrease their usage. Data is also necessary to experiment, and measure the effect. I was fascinated by [...]

As we are building the P2PU community, we are constantly thinking about how to organize communications, how transparent we should be, how we can make the community welcoming and attract more volunteers, etc. Initially it started as mostly communications between the five founders, then after Berlin, we felt like a really strong bigger community, and [...]

Preparing for a course My supervisor at OISE is co-teaching a course with two of his PhD students called “KMD: Knowledge Communities: Patterns and Practices”, and he very graciously invited me to give a talk about “open education resources, P2PU, implications of new media for learning communities, etc”. They would require a brief intro, a [...]

I should probably have written a lot more about Peer2Peer University, it’s developing rapidly, facing tons of challenges, and turning out to be an amazing learning process about so many different aspects of social learning and the creation of online communities. But I end up writing my thoughts on the mailing lists, and working on [...]

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 [...]