I am trying to purchase a flight ticket, but because I am an international student, my credit limit is just 1000$, and the ticket costs 1,150$. The fact that I have over 10,000$ in my account is not important, I can’t seem to buy this ticket. Since I have been a customer of CIBC‘s for [...]

I’ve been interested in accreditation/evaluation of Open Education for a long time, and when we discussed a number of different theoretical approaches to the purpose of schooling, and the purpose of accreditation, in class, I realized that it would be very interesting to try to apply these theories to the problem of accreditation of open [...]

Education Commons is the unit at OISE that handles all the technology needs for teaching, learning and research and they run an infrequent speaker’s series on topics that would interest graduate students and faculty. Last fall, Leslie Chan presented on open access (video), and at that time he very generously proposed me as a future [...]

Yesterday while looking through the very small adult section in the community library where I am volunteering in Varanasi, I came across a guidebook about Toronto (Toronto: The Unknown City). Although the title is a bit misleading, since it’s more of a conventional guidebook than anything very “unknown” (at least by residents), I still enjoyed [...]

I’ve always loved reading literature or watching TV-series/movies about cities and places where I have been/are. When attending high school in Italia, it was a special treat reading a novel in Italian where the protagonist would explain that his mother was from Trieste, and his father from Milano… I lived close to Trieste, and I [...]

I came across an interesting collection of photos of high-density housing in Hong Kong (thank you, Spacing Toronto), some very aesthetic pictures. I haven’t spend much time in Hong Kong, and don’t understand the city as I wish I did, but these pictures made me think of something. When discussing the past, present and future [...]

Two of Canada’s three leading national newspapers had the following news on their front page: SUV sales down because of high gas prices. That made me very happy. I remember discussing high gas prices with a friend I was staying over with in Arkansas (this was before Hurricane Katrina, but gas prices were still high [...]

One of the reasons the iPod family has been so successful, apart from their sleek design and shrewd marketing, has to the whole ecosystem of services and gear that has grown up around the players. You can buy bags, belts, microphones, radio transmitters – you can put linux on them, use the notes function to [...]

Back So I am back in Toronto. It’s been a little over a week now, but it seems a lot longer. From the day I arrived here, tired and dirty, with a backpack full of laundry – to a room completely empty except for a dresser. I gradually assembled some second-hand and free furniture, got [...]