Over the years since the Top Level Courses Project was launched in 2003, an ecosystem of services and providers has grown up around it. The Ministry of Education organizes a number of conferences and training sessions, as do provincial boards of education. As described in the case studies, universities themselves will organize internal training, both [...]

Initially there were no easy ways of finding out about the Chinese open courses, except for going to each individual university’s open course directory. There were some indices, but they were not very helpful. When the Top Level Courses Project was launched, there was no easy portal for discovering all the available courses. Each university [...]

I’ve been waiting for this moment for quite a long time. Living outside of Norway for many years, I’ve always been interested in technologies that enable me to access Norwegian culture from afar. I enjoy reading Norwegian newspapers online, I listen to a few podcasts from the national radio station, I follow some of the [...]

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 just came across a new list of the 1000 most visited websites globally, hosted by Google’s AdPlanner. There isn’t too much information about how the list was put together, although it’s noted that certain pages that are not open to the world, spam sites, and porn sites have been removed (it would have been [...]

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 [...]

I have begun tweeting at conferences where it is appropriate and feasible. It serves multiple purposes, providing me a way of reflecting on what is being said, as a back-channel with other conference attendees, and to share some of what is happening with the outside world. Although 140 characters is obviously very short, I have [...]

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 [...]