Above you see such a box – it automatically grabs the title from the web page to be used for the link, but allows me to edit it. I click OK, get a tiny Growl acknowledgement, and I can continue on with no interruption.

I might find some more text that I want to clip, from the same page, or from a different page, and I can simply click Ctrl+Alt+Cmd+J for “clip-again”, which will send the text to the same place I sent the last clipping, without bothering to ask (again I will only see a Growl acknowledgment). This is on the theory that often you are gathering information on the same topic from several sources.

If the page doesn’t already exist, it gets created with the proper headline. If it already exists, the new text or URL gets appended at the bottom of the page, separated by a line, and with a link back to the original page. If the clipping was from an article in researchr, the link is a properly formatted citation.

The idea is that I don’t necessarily need to “integrate” the information with the rest of the article right away. I can keep adding information to it, and when I get around to it, I can sit down and organize it properly. Sometimes I go out to research a subject, and add a large amount of links or information in an afternoon, and then sit down to organize it, other times pages grow slowly from month to month, before I get around to doing anything.

The article on fuzzy text matching is a good example of the result of a day’s work, where I finally sat down to clean it up, and document some results of my experimentation. During the clipping, it looked quite messy.

But the the final version is a very useful reference for me, and might even be useful to others.

I recently came across an interesting blog entry criticizing the theory of andragogy, which I had seen referred to in several papers on MOOCs. Not only were the points in the blog post well made, but the post had attracted a range of comments, and some had even written entire blog posts in response. I felt the need to summarize and organize this information, so I used the clipping functionality to grab all the relevant text, and then used the side-by-side view to organize the article.

The side-by-side view is inspired by the split-screen view in Scrivener (of course, this is not something that Scrivener invented, but that is where I really learnt the power of having raw notes on one side, and the thing you are writing on the other side), and I use it to turn the raw clippings from PDFs I’ve read in Skim into higher level notes (as detailed here), but the functionality is available on any webpage. You can even edit any wikipage “with itself”.

Using this approach, I was able to quickly gather information from a number of webpages, grab some pictures from a PDF, and organize it all into one succinct page. This gave me a much better overview of the different arguments, and gives me a good base to go out and learn more about andragogy, or to think more critically about whether the theory is relevant or not.

I made a quick screencast showing the tools in use, pretty much as I’ve narrated in this blog post.

Stian

The policy refers to both idealistic reasons, such as the institute’s commitment to increasing access to its research, as well as pragmatic reasons, with more and more funders requiring Open Access (such as CIHR). The key part of the policy, after the pre-amble and before some explanations, is this:

For any scholarly article accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, faculty members are encouraged to retain or obtain the right to deposit and to deposit the article electronically into T- Space, the University of Toronto’s research repository, along with non-exclusive permission to preserve and freely disseminate it. Support is available for this process; faculty members are encouraged to provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the OISE/UT Library, who will make the article available to the public in T-Space, the open access repository operated by the University of Toronto Libraries. 

This policy is the result of more than three years of work led by a group of people in the “Research Standing Committee Open Access sub-committee”, which included discussions in the Research Standing Committee and Faculty Council, as well as an open Town Hall meeting (see recording of the entire meeting, or just my 5 minute appeal). Originally it began life as a “mandate”, modeled on, and inspired by the mandates at Harvard, MIT and Stanford School of Education. This work got a boost by a very spirited presentation by John Willinsky during Open Access Week 2009.

In the end, however, this turned out to be very difficult, with the mandate being challenged by university lawyers, the faculty union, questions about whether the Faculty Council had the authority to approve it, etc. Finally, we decided to go for a much-watered down “policy” to at least get some movement.

Because of the way academia works in North America, any mandate would anyway be quite toothless given the required opt-out clauses. Thus, no matter what the actual policy says, much of the work is in creating a culture of Open Access, providing technical support for submitting, coming up with guidelines and workflows, and changing mindsets.

There have been a wide range of events during the past few years to popularize Open Access at University of Toronto and at OISE, including Open Access Week in 2009, 2010 and 2011.

Open Access week display in OISE lobby

There has also been much practical work done with making T-Space easier to use (although we have a long way to go there), exposing statistics, etc. The library, with support from the Open Access sub-committee has created guidelines for OISE faculty to deposit in T-Space, and hired work-for-study students to help faculty deposit their publications.

So much has been done, but much more remains to be done. It’s interesting to contrast the relative inertia of the field of education, with other fields such as the hard sciences, computer science or medicine. Despite a great interest in knowledge mobilization at OISE, not many see the connections between this and Open Access.

It’s especially funny for such a “radical” institution, where many professors are feminists and activists writing about popular education movements in Latin America, the Occupy Wall-Street movements, etc. Yet, how many of them have even heard about the growing movement of over 10,000 scientists who have vowed to boycott Springer Elsevier? And what are we doing about Taylor and Francis, which in many cases give us fewer rights to self-archive than Springer Elsevier does? (T&F are behind 70% of the journals that OISE faculty publish in).

One policy down, lot’s of work left to do! :)

Stian

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, the public, etc. Our goal in this case would be to give everyone in the world access to download PDFs from Elsevier and Springer, and the research would largely be policy-related.

Another perspective would be to ask: What new ways of interacting with publications can be enabled by Open Access, which are impossible with Toll Access journals, even those for which you have paid subscription fees. I believe this is in some ways a more compelling story for many authors, because the first argument is largely based on charity – they might think that they themselves, and all their friends at elite universities, all have access. However, the second approach is to show how Open Access can make your research work easier and faster, even when you are at an elite institution.

Of course, the extent to which innovative new workflows and analyses can be implemented also depend on the “degree” of openess, given that the term Open Access covers a wide array of cases. The minimal (but also the most common) case is to expect the ability to download a PDF without logging in, or paying money. The ideal case would be a Creative Commons-licensed article, preferably in a semantic open text-based format (not PDF), with machine-readable metadata, linked datasets, semantic citations, etc.

I have spent a lot of time pushing for policy change around OA, and I am in awe of what we have already accomplished, and I also know we have a lot left to do. However, I feel that the OA community has not sufficiently addressed this other technical part, and I believe increasing the use-value of OA journals can do a lot to convince academics to become more active with self-archiving etc.

Researchr

I mentioned a number of dimensions of openness above, but even with just the PDF file available, there are things we can do. When I see a citation in a journal article, on a social citation sharing website, or on somebody’s blog or wiki, which I find interesting, what is the first thing I want to do? Import the citation and the PDF into my citation manager.

If you are really lucky, the location that posted the citation also offers machine-readable metadata, such as BibTeX. However, there is very seldom any distinction made between OA and non-OA publications – in both cases, the PDFs are not hosted on the site, because of copyright issues (which is correct in most cases, since a very small percentage of OA articles are openly licensed). Sadly, it is very rare that the metadata contains a link to download the PDF, even though theoretically, that would actually be the most important part of the metadata. (After all, the reason we create such standardized formatting schemes is to make it easy for other people to locate the article we cited).

And the few times the URL field in a BibTeX entry is filled in, it goes to an abstract page, from which we can download the PDF. The same is true for DOI, which always resolves to an HTML abstract page, and almost never to the actual publication – even when the publication is OA, and can be downloaded without login, etc.

Initially, Researchr was no distinction. I simply captured the BibTeX offered by Google Scholar, or other sites. Of course, I always endeavored to find the PDF and download for my own purposes, but I was not able to share these online, because of copyright. Thus, an article page on my wiki for an OA article, would look identical to that of a TA article, and users would have to copy the title into Google Scholar to locate the PDF.

I really wanted to change this, and thought about ways of automatically capturing the download URL when importing PDFs. It turns out there is a very elegant solution – OSX Finder stores the download URL as part of a file’s metadata, even when using Chrome.

We can easily access this information through the command line

mdls -name kMDItemWhereFroms FILENAME

Thus I could easily add this URL to the citation’s metadata, tag it as Open Access, display this in various ways in the wiki, etc.

However, was the file really Open Access? If I am sitting at the University of Toronto, I can download PDFs from all the big publishers, because they have “whitelisted” the IP ranges belonging to the University of Toronto. However, these PDFs are not available outside of the university. How to distinguish?

I wrote a tiny little API, which I uploaded to my public server, which sits outside of University of Toronto, and does not have any special privileges. It accepts a URL as an argument, and attempts to download the header of that URL (ie. even though the PDF might be 5MB, it will only download a few hundred bytes). It checks whether the URL accepts at all, and whether it is of the kind “PDF” (ie. it’s not an HTML abstract page).

If successful, it simply returns “true”, and the URL is added to the file’s metadata.

So far, I have not done anything specific to display this fact, although the citation template automatically displays the contents of the URL field in the citation.

Eventually, I want to make a big nice (green?) icon next to this metadata field saying “PDF Download” or something similar. However, since the URL field is also present in the hidden machine-readable metadata field below, we are able to do some fun stuff.

I traditionally used Ctrl+Alt+Cmd+B as a shortcut to grab a citation from Google Scholar. I enhanced this script to also look for the hidden BibTeX on a Researchr wiki page. If it finds it, it imports it into BibDesk. If it also finds a URL field, it attempts to automatically download the PDF, and autolink it to the citation in BibDesk.

I further had some fun with the page numbers from the raw clippings – if you press a page number on somebody else’s wiki, and the metadata has the URL field, it will attempt to download the PDF, and open it on the correct page! See the 3 minute demo below (which also includes our new experimental social Researchr server):

I think this is a pretty neat example of what is possible with OA publications. Currently, this functionality only exists in Researchr, but all the data is open and standardized (BibTeX), so other citation managers could build this in as well – and ideally, more metadata will come with the URL field filled in. In fact, maybe we need a new field, something like OA-URL, to denote both that the publication is OA, and that this is a URL that goes directly to a download, rather than to an HTML abstract. (In fact, embedding the publication license in the BibTeX metadata wouldn’t be dumb either).

Stian

Readings

I continued reading several papers by Paul Bouchard at the University of Concordia about adult self-directed learners, and two critiques of human capital theory. In total, I now have high-level notes on 13 of his papers on his author page.

I revisited Joe Corneli and Charlie Danoff’s work on “paragogy”, and I’ve read eight of their papers. I still need to read more, including Howard Rheingold and his group’s work on peeragogy, which builds closely on paragogy, but I find many of the ideas very interesting.

I also read

• Abedin, 2011 about Web 2.0 and learning
• Alevizou, 2010 about three P2PU courses, and De Liddo & Alevizou, 2010 on using Cohere to analyze learning in a P2PU course
• Bacsich, Phillips & Bristow, 2011, a large report about research on learner-interaction with OER from the UK
• McAndrew, 2010 on the changing definitions of openess with the Open University in the UK, and Weller & Robinson, 2001 on scaling up an Open University course to reach 12,000 students with more than 500 tutors
• Schejbal, 2012 on challenges for universities in the 21st century
• a number of papers on MOOCs and personal learning networks: Waard et al., 2011, Fournier & Kop, 2011, Fournier, Kop & Sitlia, 2011, Kop & Hill, 2008 and Kop, 2010.

AERA

I spent several days at AERA, and used the wiki to take notes at some of the sessions. However, the daily schedule here is quite exhausting, and there were also sessions that were not that relevant to my research, lack of battery etc, which meant that I did not take notes of that many sessions. So far I have notes from four sessions (usually with five presentations each), including two about self-regulated learning, one about wikis in education, and one about computer-supported collaborative learning.

I also had a chance to meet with Ryan Muller, another user of Researchr, and we had a great four-hour walk through Stanley park and Granville Island discussing possible future ideas for Researchr, Open Access publishing, etc. I also met with Heather Morrison and Heather Piwowar, both very active in Open Access from different perspectives, and had very exciting conversations with them – expect to see more about that in the future.

Researchr

As usual, I couldn’t quite avoid stealing in some time to work on Researchr, and I made 15 commits.

In addition to the weekly review, I felt the need for a space to keep unstructured notes and ideas for future processing. I thought it would be really nice if I could capture the context in which these notes had been made, and I used a modification of the cleanup script I introduced last week to automatically output a list of the articles and pages I had been working on during the last 24 hours, as a proxy for my “mental context” at the time of taking the notes. This script isn’t quite finished yet, but here is an example of how it works.

I spent quite a lot of time implementing “semantic” search and trackbacks with proper titles for articles pages, which I wrote up on my blog, and finally I made a bunch of minor fixes, cleanups etc, including making the clip and clip-again scripts more robust and with nicer output.

Stian

Researchr is built on DokuWiki, which has worked out incredibly well. It stores all the data in flat text files (for example the page andragogy is stored in /wiki/data/pages/andragogy.txt, and the contents is identical to the wikimarkup you see when you edit a page). This means that I can easily access and modify these text files from scripts, I can search and index them using external tools, backing up is as easy as copying the entire DokuWiki folder to another location, and I can easily keep two versions in sync through rsync. (This is how I edit locally, and publish to my server).

Within DokuWiki, I use a large number of plugins to get the functionality I need. One of the most crucial one is the include plugin. This lets you include another wiki page into the current wiki page. If you look at an article page, like Bouchard, 2001, you see that it contains several sections – it starts out with a citation, and some links (including a hidden BibTeX field), then there are the high level notes, then the raw clippings from Skim, and finally the pictures I’ve imported from Skim.

However, if you click on edit this page, after the top citation information, all you see is this:

{{page>notes:bouchard2001experiential}}

h2. Links here
{{backlinks>.}}

{{page>clip:bouchard2001experiential}}

{{page>kindle:bouchard2001experiential}}

{{page>skimg:bouchard2001experiential}}

This is because the information is stored in a number of other files, with the same file name, but in other namespaces. (A namespace in a wiki is kind of like a directory). The fact that the clippings and the high level notes are stored separately is what enables “side-by-side” editing:

It’s also what makes it possible to go back and add more highlights to the Skim file, and export that again to the wiki, without overwriting high level notes, etc.

However, the one challenge with this approach is that DokuWiki doesn’t understand that I never really want to see the pages in the clip: namespace alone, I always want to see them in the context of a full publication (with the head page in the ref: namespace). So when I added automatic backlinks to articles (which you see included above, using another plugin), they would display as “Key ideas” (because that’s usually the title I use for the notes: section), and when I did a search, it would look like below:

I thought it would be fun to try to rewrite the search to take into account what I know about the structure of the data. I am very poor at php, and not familiar with the DokuWiki code base (I’ve written some very simple plugins before to support Researchr, but never really touched the main code base).

It took me quite a while, both figuring out the flow of the program, and coming up with something which worked. I fixed the backlinks quite quickly, and then had some fun re-imagining the search.

In addition to the namespaces that make out an article page, I also have a few “semantic” namespaces, such as a: for authors, and t: for tools. I’ve also created namespaces for conferences I’ve attended, like cscl11: for CSCL 2011 (although I’ve been thinking for a while that I should consolidate them under a conf: namespace). I thought that it might be fun to let search be “aware” of these distinctions.

Initially I thought I had come up with “faceted search”, but looking at the Wikipedia entry, I think I would have needed to give several different ways of sorting the hits, rather than just one.

I removed the snippets, since they look ugly (wiki markup isn’t rendered) and it seemed to slow things down quite a bit. Either way, opening a link highlights all the hits, and moves automatically to the first hit.

I experimented with replacing hits on article pages (and clips, notes etc) with the full citations, but found that far too ugly (see screenshot), so I ended up with just using the page names (which are the article titles). I might experiment with this in the future.

Either way, I’m quite pleased with the result, even though the code is a horror (I’m did the experimentation on my live wiki, so I need to clean it up and move it to the DokuWiki fork in the Researchr GitHub repository, but I threw up a quick gist).

Of course, the search is live now, so you can try for yourself.

Stian

Stian

I feel like I’ve gotten a bit off track this term, spent a lot of time experimenting with Researchr and thinking about Science 2.0, ways of improving the scholarly workflow etc. However, I really need to refocus on my PhD research, as fascinating as everything else is, and the fact that I will be seeing my supervisor shortly at AERA in Vancouver was a good motivation to “buckle down” and try to get at least part of my literature review done before then.

This part of my literature review is on open courses and peer learning. I want to see what empirical research has already been done (not a whole lot), and also what theoretical frameworks and methods others have used to investigate/discuss this topic. In fact, just the framing itself of what is an open course, and why they are so interesting to me, is quite fascinating.

I already had some interesting papers, but I spent quite a lot of time finding others, both by Google Scholar searches for keywords, and by finding out who are “active in the field”, and looking at lists of all of their publications. Generally, there is an incredible amount of writings on Open Educational Resources, but much less on learning interactions. Many of the papers which showed up in the keyword searches were very generalist, and tended to mention for example Peer2Peer University in a sentence as “one interesting new possibility”.

I’m hoping to write up a much more organized literature review during this week, so I will not spend this blog entry trying to accomplish that, but I will quickly list the articles I’ve read that I’ve also taken detailed notes on (there are many more which I read and took clippings of, but have not yet written detailed notes about). Some of the papers below I had read before, without taking notes, so I had to go through them again to see what I could use in the literature review:

• I read a number of papers by Martin Weller, and I found his metaphor of the “topography of formality” quite visual and striking in Weller & Dalziel, 2007
• A bunch of papers about MOOCs and learning, including McAuley et al., 2010, Mackness, Mak & Williams, 2010, Kop, Fournier & Mak, 2011, Kop & Carroll, 2011, Fini, 2009 and Bell, 2010
• Rita Kop also wrote about personal learning networks in Kop, 2010
• It was interesting to hear about Alec Couros’ course EC&I 831 in Couros, 2010
• I came across Paul Bouchard in Rita Kop’s writings and found some of his early work on adult learners very interesting, I read Bouchard, 1998, Bouchard & Kalman, 1998, Bouchard, 1994 and Bouchard, 1996
• Read some papers on the history and development of Open University UK, including McAndrew, 2010

I read 34 more papers where I did not add significant notes yet. Some of these were not interesting, or mostly rehashes of other papers, but for most I will have to go back and add significant notes. I find it takes much more mental capacity to add high-level notes than to do the first read-through, but it’s incredibly valuable. Maybe I will try to track the relationship between articles read and high-level notes written during the coming weeks (I modified the cleanup script to make this easy to display).

Researchr

I tried to focus on literature review, and not do any work on Researchr. But of course, lit review means using Researchr for many hours every day, and there are inevitably small issues that crop up, and which I am tempted to deal with right away. Looking back, I did 17 commits, with some tiny fixes, but also with some useful new functionality.

Even such a small thing as cleaning up all the brok- en words from a PDF export, a one line change, makes a big difference in a tool you use so much. Bodong let me know that my RSS feed was broken, which I quickly fixed. I also made sure to avoid RSS duplicates, and made it possible to update RSS entries. Finally I created a quick “citation selection popup”, and consolidated some files. I also began working on a script that can do some “cleanup and sanity checking” (like finding PDFs not linked to any publication, etc.)

This upcoming week, I hope to continue reading articles, adding high-level notes to already read articles, and develop a skeletal literature review (which I’ll also post on the wiki). Thursday I am off to AERA in Vancouver, and will try to keep notes from sessions on the wiki (also looking forward to meeting Ryan Muller, and anyone else out there).

I try to post articles with significant high-level notes to my wiki RSS feed, which is automatically republished on my wikiblog.

Hope you had a productive week!

Stian

Publishing formats

My thesis is licensed under the Creative Commons BY license, which allows others to modify and build upon your work. However, it is very difficult to modify a work that is in a non-modifiable file format. Therefore, I wanted to release my thesis in a format that was modifiable – in this case, I chose Word DOC, RTF and Open Document Format (ODT) to cover all cases (it’s trivial to generate several formats from the same program).

Some people like to print out long documents for ease of reading. The standard way of formatting an MA thesis, with double line space and generous margins, is great for editing and annotation, but not ideal for general reading. So I created another version, with two columns, wider margins, and single line spacing (this was also available in all the formats listed above).

E-book readers are also becoming more and more popular, and are especially well-suited to long form reading like theses. It is usually possible to shoe-horn a PDF into one of these, however it doesn’t look pretty, and you loose certain features, such as table of contents.

I generated epub and mobi versions of the thesis, suitable for Kindle, iBooks and most other devices. I also tried to make the book available on Kindle as a self-published book, but Amazon will not allow free self-published books, and I didn’t want to charge for one version, while others were free. (I did publish to SmashWords, but they messed up the Chinese characters).

Once I had the Chinese translation ready in July, 2011, I also posted several versions of this, including PDF, Word, RTF and ODT

Other dissemination methods

In addition to posting the files, I decided to experiment with syndicating the thesis on my blog. This had two purposes. First, I personally often end up downloading a lot of long documents, without ever getting around to reading them. However, if you “drip feed” me information over many days, I am much more likely to absorb the information.

The other point was to give each individual “piece” of the thesis an individual URL, so that people could link to it. In addition to making a main point, every thesis probably consists of a number of logical “pieces”, which have some value in themselves. There is the overview of Chinese higher education history in the lit review, there is the section on a commercial ecosystem around open courses in China, etc. Now, other blogs or websites which want to refer to these pieces can link directly to them rather than saying “look up page 50 in this PDF”. (Having individual URLs also makes it much easier to tweet and retweet links).

So I posted the thesis on my blog progressively over a period of months, always tweeting out links as well. Some of the blog posts got a number of retweets and were also mentioned in other blogs on OER.

I also uploaded my thesis to T-Space, the University of Toronto repository, as we are obliged to do according to the policy of the university, and also uploaded it to Google Books.

Statistics

So after almost 1.5 years, what do the numbers look like? I use both AWStats and Google Analytics to analyze my traffic – neither is perfect. AWStats often overreport hits, because of all the referral spam, however Google Analytics does not capture PDF downloads at all. I also think the download numbers are far less exaggerated than the page hits. So I looked up the download statistics for the last 1.5 years to see which files were most downloaded.

In total, my thesis has been downloaded 2.600 times.

In addition, the thesis got downloaded 29 times from T-Space. This seems incredibly little, but in this particular case, it is not very surprising. First, it was only published several months later on T-Space, because the university waits until convocation before releasing the documents. At this point, many of the downloads from my website had already happened. Also, because I released so much information from my own website, anyone searching for my thesis would find links to my website, instead of T-Space. I think T-Space is a good option for students who do not have an active web presence, but its clear from these statistics that T-Space does not promote browsing and exploration (not strange, given its quite convoluted design).

I also got very low numbers at Google Books, again probably because my other files came up much higher in searches. (In contrast, I got quite high reading numbers for my undergraduate honors thesis on Google Books, particularly the Indonesian version).

Non-numeric outcomes and the future

These numbers by themselves don’t necessarily mean all that much, they don’t tell me how many people have read the thesis, or how many people found it useful. But it’s quite interesting to see, for example the distribution of file formats (despite the fact that it’s so easy to generate multiple formats that even if few people download them, a case could still be made for making them available). In addition to pure numbers, I have connected with many interesting people, and met people at conferences that I didn’t even know who told me “I followed your thesis with interest”. I even had an e-mail from a journal editor inviting me to turn my thesis into a paper for his journal.

I hope this post has inspired you to think about how you publish your own research, whether it’s your MA or PhD thesis, or you are further in your academic career. I certainly don’t think what I did is the definitive answer, and I would love to see what others can come up with. For my PhD thesis, I am not waiting until my thesis is released, I built a system to enable me to take all my working notes in the public and hopefully, when my thesis is released, every single citation will link back to the notes I took when I first read that paper.

Stian

British Journal of Educational Technology

The English article appeared in British Journal of Educational Technology as “Online First” in November 2011. Judging by the backlog, it might not make it into the actual journal for another year, however since it’s available online, I count it as “published”.

This article was a very long time in the making, a process which began a year before my MA thesis was completed. It is based on a paper which Wang Long wrote for International Review of Research on Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL). Wang Long works at the Chinese People’s Public Security University, and I had seen his name on a number of articles about Chinese Top Level Courses, so when I was in Beijing, I contacted him. It was quite funny, as I was standing outside the ports of the university waiting for him. He called me on his cellphone asking me where I was, and I said “right here”. It turns out that he didn’t expect me to be a foreigner, and I didn’t expect him to be dressed in a police uniform.

I was very impressed by Wang Long as a person with a real passion for OER, who has pursued his research for many years, often without funding or external support. He told me that IRRODL had told him his paper was very interesting, but the English was not good enough, and asked if I would be willing to work with him to improve it.

It turned out that it wasn’t only the English which needed editing, the article itself was written in a way that would have been very foreign to non-Chinese readers. Thus began a two-year process of collaborating on improving the article. The article flew between Toronto and Beijing, with long emails about changes and discussions of sources. We decided to target the British Journal of Educational Technology (which even has a corresponding editor in China), and submitted the first draft in December 2010.

We got positive feedback, but lot’s of comments, and spent about three months addressing these. At that point, my MA thesis had already been published, and I was able to incorporate interview data and references from that as well. The second draft was submitted, more comments, and finally the third draft was fully accepted. Official version, PDF.

Open Education Research Journal (Chinese)

After having my thesis translated into Chinese (PDF), I also wanted to turn it into a journal article in a Chinese journal. Again I worked with Wang Long, who too a first stab of shortening the thesis to a journal article. We collaborated closely on highlighting the aspects I thought would be the most interesting for a Chinese audience, and making it into a coherent whole (something that would have been almost impossible for me without his help).

We finally had the article accepted by 开放教育研究杂志 (Open Education Research Journal), hosted at Shanghai TV University, which has published a long series of articles about China Top Level Courses and foreign OER projects. The article came out in January, and is currently available online. Official version, PDF.

I am still planning one more journal publication from the thesis (which I should have gotten out a long time ago), but I am quite happy with these two publications, and especially happy for the great collaboration with Wang Long. I think this way of helping each other getting published in “each others” languages is a great model that could be useful to others as well.

Stian

However, Arabic is tricky in it’s own right (letters look different depending on whether it’s at a start of a word, the end of a word, etc, and vowels are typically not included), and the typically writing style used with Urdu, Nastaliq is very ornamented, and relies on stacking letters on top of each other in a way that I find very hard to decode. The picture below is not from a religious text, but the headline of a daily newspaper (which posts its articles as pictures, because they cannot replicate this effect using computer fonts).

In contrast, below is a newspaper headline from a daily newspaper in Saudi Arabia, which uses the Naskh style of writing, common for published secular material in the Arab-speaking world.

So that’s a challenge, but obviously not something completely insuperable. However, the other thing that kept bugging me is that even if I put in a lot of effort to learn to read Urdu, there isn’t really that much worth reading that’s easily available to me…

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a great Urdu poetry tradition, and I’ve always wanted to read the works of Ibn-e Safi, a Pakistani who never travelled outside Pakistan, but wrote a 120-book ouvre about a Pakistani spy on secret missions around the world… But it’s very hard to find Urdu literature online, or in Toronto (if I find it online, it’s typically in scanned format, which means I cannot use online dictionaries), and just like with the Indian languages, there isn’t that much modern literature being written (English being more prominent).

I still really want to learn Urdu, as well as proper fluent Hindi for that matter, at some point. But in the meantime, I decided to study… Russian! I know, quite different. But it’s another language which I’ve learnt a bit of, but never gained fluency in.

My first meeting with Russian was taking the trans-Siberian from Norway to Beijing for my first trip to China (and first time leaving Europe) in 2001. I spent a month there, visiting Esperantists. Later, I travelled through Russia on the train one more time, and also spent some time travelling through the ‘stans in Central Asia. I picked up a few words, but never learnt much.

Then in 2004, I had a chance to go to People’s Friendship University of Russia for a one month intensive course in Russian, together with activists from different civil society organizations in Europe, funded by the European Council (the picture below is from the school’s homepage).The school is a pretty interesting place – it’s where a lot of African and Asian leaders were trained in the communist era, and to this day 60% of the students are from Asia and Africa. We had this wonderful old babushka of a teacher, who had dedicated her life to teaching Russian to foreigners, and we learnt a lot. But of course, there’s still a limit to how much you can learn during a month – and worse, I barely ever had a chance to use Russian in the years after (this was in 2003).

So I can read the alphabet, know some of the grammar, and remember some of the words, but that’s about it. Now, the neat thing about Russian, which I’ve been noticing during the last few years, is that there is a huge amount of material available online. Russian literature is well known, but there is not just classical literature, there are tons of novels being published continuously. And most of this is readily available online. As well as Russian movies, and the thing that I love – audiobooks!

So somehow I made a snap decision, and decided to do a 30-day Russian Challenge. Rather than reading a classical novel, I wanted to read something that is very popular in Russia right now. I came across Boris Akunin, who seems really cool, and is apparently one of the best-selling authors currently. He writes detective novels set in Tsarist Russia, and is very web savvy – his novels are available for free download on his website, and he has even created websites for some of the characters in his books.

So I grabbed one of his books, The Winter Queen, or Азазель in Russian, and was able to download the full-text in both English and Russian. I also found the audio book in Russian! So for one month, I will spend one hour each day (technically two pomodori) reading the novel in Russian, using the TranslateIt dictionary to provide mouse-over dictionary look-up. The way I do it, is to have the book open in TextEdit, so I can use the mouse-over dictionary. For every few sentences or paragraph, I read the same section of the book in the English translation, on my Kindle. I find this kind of bi-lingual reading really effective (it would be great if more authors put out bi-lingual editions, but in the meantime, we can hack it like this).

I have no idea if this is the best way to learn a language – choosing a fairly complex book, rather than a pedagogically adapted text, but at this point, I’m much more interested in reading an interesting, authentic text, rather than something that was designed for me.

Update: I wrote the draft for this blog post in November, and did enjoy this “Russian challenge” for about two weeks, making steady progress and having a lot of fun, before I fell out of it due to too many other commitments. I am going to try to take up the thread again now, so I am finally posting this.

Stian