I love seeing material in multiple languages, even languages I don’t understand. As populations have become more diverse around the world, public libraries have risen to the challenge, and whether you visit the Public Library in Oslo, or in Toronto, they have wonderful collections of children and adult books (and often films, DVDs, magazines and [...]

IssueLab, whose energetic staff member Lisa Brooks I met at Open Ed 2008, is a place for non-profits to share their research. Having worked at CARE Indonesia, I certainly know first hand that much great research is produced, and never shared, often even lost among staff changes and USB keys, so this is a very [...]

I have only visited New York once before, a few days in the summer a few years ago. Both then and now my time was spent trying to meet up with a few friends living here, and pounding the sidewalk in Manhattan to get an idea of the city. This time I was hoping to [...]

Update: I removed the inline-link to the trailer, since it didn’t look nice in Windows browsers. Quicktime. I came across this documentary on Yao Ming, the Chinese NBA player that has made, and found it quite interesting. I knew that Yao Ming was an important role model to Chinese in the US and in China [...]

Update: I apologize for a) posting a broken link and b) taking so long to fix it. Thank you to those who pointed it out, and please try again, it’s worth it. I just found out that the excellent documentary on the sit-in at Harvard, that I mentioned in the last post, is available online! [...]

While researching what would end up being a poorly written essay on modernization theory and Laos (don’t ask), I came across the Journal of Higher Education, a topic that interests me verily, and I read a few articles. One that stood out was a comparison between the US and Canadian university systems in terms of [...]

This ia weird little story, that I don’t know all the details of. I am just researching an essay about Laos, a country I visited twice in the past. (Reading the history is very useful, and makes me realize that many of the judgments and assumptions I made about the country when I was there, [...]

I have written before about access to education, distance learning and so on. Today I idly flipped through the 300 channels of our kind host in Idyllwild, after having checked that the float we visited for the Rosebowl made it through the rain. After checking out a few news programmes, a Spanish talk shows and [...]

I always loved trains, and I have taken my share of them, whether it’s the beautiful and comfortable intercity from my homecity Hamar to Oslo, the Norwegian capital, or doing the transsiberian from Moscow down to Beijing. In China I spent a lot of time on trains, and they are awesome; the train stations look [...]

I just finished reading “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. He makes many arguments in the book, many of which I agree to, although I think he is quite a little bit too optimistic about technodeterminism and the whole world becoming equal and happy. One of his starting thoughts, which I quite liked, is [...]