One piece of functionality in researchr that I find myself using quite frequently, is the ability to clip arbitrary amounts of texts from any webpage and send it to a given wikipage very quickly. The way it works is that I select some text (if I don’t select any text, it will just use the page [...]

Two perspectives on Open Access promotion There are two different ways of promoting Open Access publishing to academic authors, and also two different perspectives from which to conduct research. The first is to say that the current system is wonderful, but many people are locked out – academics at smaller institutions, teachers and school administrations, [...]

I really intended to focus on my literature review these few weeks, and put Researchr hacking aside, but using it for many hours per day there are always little niggling things you want to fix. And sometimes I get ideas that I just “have to try out”. Researchr is built on DokuWiki, which has worked out [...]

I just wrote about two articles published based on my MA thesis about Chinese Open Courses, and this inspired me to look at some of the download statistics from my website. Back in 2008, I wrote about the idea of a “Fair Trade” symbol for research, and the idea the research ethics shouldn’t stop with the [...]

One of the presentations that impressed me at the recent GCCCE 2011 was by Chen Wenli on using GroupScribbles for language learning. To be honest, I was more fascinated by the tool, than by the exact way in which she had used it. This is a good example of how you the way you read [...]

Anna de Liddo and Simon Buckingham Shum, both of whom I met at Learning Analytics 2011 in Banff, provide a very different take on the design of collaborative environments, in their article about Cohere. Instead of focusing on little kids “playing scientists” and learning to think like scientists, they focus on actual scientists, politicians, city [...]

I was very excited when I first came across Dan Suther’s 2008 article “Empirical studies of the value of conceptually explicit notations in collaborative learning” in the book “Knowledge Cartography: Software tools and mapping techniques” (a book which is filled with other very interesting chapters as well). I had been acquainted with Knowledge Forum for [...]

Introduction P2PU courses typically consist of an asynchronous and a synchronous part. The asynchronous part is all the work that is done throughout the week, reading articles, posting blog posts, or comments on the site, collaborating on a wiki article, etc. The synchronous part is usually the “mass-meeting”, where all the participants who are able [...]

This spring, I took a class called “Knowledge, Media and Learning”, where one of the assignments was to do research and create a design proposal. Together with Rebecca Cober and Lixa Lin, we decided to look at the research workflow for a junior researcher, such as a graduate student. Although we could think of many [...]

I first became aware of the explosion in interest around foreign open courses in China when I was asked for an interview by a Chinese reporter writing about this phenomenon (interview in Chinese). Instead of the traditional 开放式课程 (kaifangshi kecheng) – quite a literal translation of “open courses / open courseware”, the new term being [...]