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 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 [...]

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 [...]

Background
During the presentation on Open Education around the world at OISE last week, I wanted to really highlight to people the incredible array of resources available, in many different languages. I also discussed three different purposes of openness, direct use (by target audience, usually students), reuse (ie. recontextualized by a teacher or other intermediary before [...]

My previous post on extracting an English-Chinese dictionary garnered a fair amount of attention, I got reddit‘ed (on their frontpage for a short time), solidot‘ed, mentioned on the Wall Street Journal blog, and more. Very fun. About 10,000 page views in three days, and a bunch of comments, both here and at Reddit. It was [...]

Background
Although there are some great Chinese dictionaries out there, I often encounter cases when they are not enough. I might either be looking for a specific concept, like “open access” (in scholarly publishing) and want to know how that is written in Chinese, so that I can google for articles about it in Chinese. Or [...]

Why use Slideshare?A lot of people have began posting their slides to Slideshare for sharing with others. In many ways, Slideshare makes more sense to me than for example Scribd – it’s fairly easy for me to download a PDF and view it in my local viewer, but it’s a pain to have to start [...]

I’ve been interested in e-book readers for a long time, and a good friend generously agreed to lend me his Bokeen Cybook v3 reader for a week or two to play with, since that is the only way you can really get a feel for this technology – just looking at it for a few [...]

So my website got hacked, and I lost my entire WordPress database. I realized that I could find most of the information through Google Cache, but did not look forward to the prospect of copying and pasting over 200 articles. So I thought I’d try to do it in an automated fashion – and I [...]