I’ve also had reason to learn more about the history and development of Chinese higher education, since this is very related to my research (which is in comparative education). Finally, because I am in general interested in higher education, and have been amazed at the rapid progress of the Chinese system, I’ve tried to understand more about the national debate.

Recently, I was made aware of a report called the “National Outline for Medium and Long-term Education Reform and Development (2010-2020)” (国家中长期教育改革和发展规划纲要), which will lay out the direction of Chinese education for the next ten years. This report has been more than a year in the making, with a large amount of public consultations, online consultations, and a series of expert roundtables, where both the Minister of Education, and the Prime Minister of China have participated.

Most of my research, and interest, is around higher education, so I will focus on that. During the Cultural Revolution, higher education was essentially suspended, and it only reopened in 1977, with the relaunching of the national unified exam. This was also the beginning of the 30 years of opening, which is currently celebrated in China. In the 1990’s, the government instituted large projects like Project 985 and Project 211 to increase the quality of education, and introduce communications technology into higher education. 1999 saw the beginning of an explosive growth in the system, which led to the 4 million enrolled students when I was teaching in 2001 becoming 27 million enrolled students in 2009.

So what do the next ten years hold? So far, the news that has been most widely reported is the idea that universities will become more independent from the government. I might blog more after I’ve read the report (it’s quite long), but for now, I thought I’d repost, and translate, their table over how key numbers will change from 2010 to 2020. The entire report can be found here (in a horrible Word-converted HTML file, which uses 2.7 MB to present 80KB worth of text). I didn’t find many English news articles about the report, but there are some mentions from domestic media (1, 2, 3).

A few things which I noticed. The participation rate of students goes up drastically (from 25% to 40%), but the number of students does not. This must mean that demographic predictions show a large decrease in cohort sizes. This is natural, given the lowering birthrates, but I didn’t expect it to be so clear. That will have a huge impact on the Chinese labor market in the future. I am also curious about how the much higher level of general education among the labor force in 2020, including a doubling in the amount of working-age people with a university degree, will have on all aspects of Chinese society.

This also explains why the expansion of Chinese higher education has now more or less stopped – I thought it was because they were not planning to raise participation rate strongly during the next few years, but in fact, with an increase in enrolment of just 16% over 10 years (nothing for a system that six-doubled enrolment in the previous ten years), China can reach a participation rate of 40%, which is very respectable internationally. This also means that all the new money coming into the system (another important number is that they want to raise investment in education to 4% of GDP – this of course a GDP that itself increases by 8-12% per year) will go to improve access (there is much talk about fairness and access in the plan) and quality.

Also interesting that they are not planning to increase the number of distance education students (this is my inference from the gap between students and students on campus). This is congruent with what I have heard from friends, that China is trying to reorient it’s substantial distance-education system from it’s previous role as a stop-gap from a higher education system that did not have space for everyone who wanted to study, to a tool for implementing life-long learning. This is also seen from the very ambitious figures for life-long learning (350M employed persons participating in life-long learning by 2020!).

The only kind of higher education which will increase rapidly in numbers is the number of graduate students, which will grow by 42% in real terms. Given the predicted smaller cohorts, this will mean a very large increase in the percentage of students with graduate degrees.

Given that this is a report focused on education, and not research, it doesn’t say anything about the growth in professors, researchers etc. There is another report focusing on the growth of science and technology from 2006 to 2020, which might talk more about this. These are the only numbers in the report (in a table format), the other parts seem to be much more oriented to ideals and directions, rather than measurable targets. But I will write more when I’ve read the whole thing.

Stian

I am planning to write more about what I learnt later, but for now, I wanted to share the presentation that I gave to a group of people at IGNOU. I focused on three areas: The purposes of OER, the value of openness, and the Peer2Peer University. It was an honor to share my thoughts with such an engaging and intelligent audience, and I really hope I get a chance to go back and spend more time with IGNOU in the future.

The presentation below has been synced audio+slides, so you can listen to the audio, and the slides will turn automatically. You can also download the MP3 directly.

Stian

However, even though each Wikipedia version has a lot of freedom to set its own policies, it is still part of a much larger movement. The decisions on movement-wide changes, on what the Wikimedia Foundation should work on, etc, are mostly conducted in English. Whether it be on mailing lists, discussion pages, or international conferences. This excludes many people from participating, however solving it is a very thorny question. When I was invited to the Critical Point of View: WikiWars conference in Bangalore recently (see my tweets), I thought it would be a good chance for me to think more deeply and constructively about these issues, and see if I could come up with some suggestions.

This is doubly relevant because of the Peer2Peer University, which is planning to expand to offer courses in more languages. How can we ensure that the course-organizers and students in those courses still feel like empowered parts of the community?

With this presentation, I try to make two points. First of all, to make people cognizant that there is a problem. Secondly, to realize that there is no simple solution, but that we might be able to mitigate the problem, if we put our best minds to it.

I have embedded below the presentation I gave (15 minutes), with synched audio. You can also download only the audio MP3 (5MB). Video will be published later, and I’ll link to it at that time. Below the presentation (mostly below the fold) I’ve also included my detailed “note of interest” for the conference. We are hoping to develop this further into a book-chapter or a part of a book-chapter, so I would love any kind of feedback, more ideas, or criticism from people!

Equitable Governance in Multilingual Wikipedia
Detailed interest note for WikiWars 2010 by Stian Håklev

Wikipedia began as an English-language project, but rapidly became a very international project, with editions in 270+ languages. Initially, each language was hosted on the same website, but soon, individual wikis were set up for each language. Thus, each language fostered its own community, with all communication happening in the given language on a localized Mediawiki platform. When visiting different Wikipedias, it is interesting to see the different community norms and standards that have emerged, for example different criteria for featured articles, notability, gaining admin status, etc.

Thus we have communities around the world using Wikipedia in their own language, spending large amounts of time and energy contributing to articles, and also participating actively in governance and discussion in their community. However, the different Wikipedias are also impacted by decisions made at the central level, that cover all the different Wikipedias. To what extent is this discussion and governance process accessible to users who do not speak English well?

Methods of communication for central coordination of Wikipedia (Wikimedia)
Wikipedia is a part of the larger Wikimedia family of projects, which also includes projects like Wikiversity, Wiktionary, Commons, etc. Discussion for all of these projects, and across all languages, is supposed to happen on Meta. Meta is supposed to be multilingual, however as of 2004, 85% of the material posted there was in English. I don’t have newer figures, but despite the fact that there are facilities for translating Wikipages on Meta-Wiki, and some projects and standards for promoting translation, anecdotal evidence suggests that translation is very spotty, if available at all.

As an example, if I enter the front page of http://meta.wikimedia.org, I will see a list of “Meta in many languages”. Let us assume that I am a Japanese user – Japanese is the second most popular Wikipedia in terms of hits, with 1,3 million hits per hour (as of Nov 30, 2009), and English knowledge among Japanese is often limited. I would select to see Meta in Japanese, and I receive a very deceptively nice Japanese page with a number of links, to ongoing discussions about new projects, requests for adminship, links to mailing lists and IRC channels, news, etc. However, with very few exceptions, when I click on any of these links, the resulting page is in English. Thus if I as a Japanese user, who have made large an important contributions to both the content and the governance of the Japanese Wikipedia, decide that I want to participate in the central coordination, I have no venue except to learn English.

As mentioned above, there are also IRC channels, and a large number of mailing lists, including foundation-l, which discusses the legal and organizational issues facing the Wikimedia foundation, and wikitech-l, which is the main forum for coordinating development of the Mediawiki platform that all Wikipedias run on. These international mailing lists are all in English. There are also local mailing lists for each language, and in a few cases, regional mailing lists covering adjacent languages (there was a Scandinavian mailing list, for example, but it seems defunct).

Physical meetings
Every year, the Wikimedia Foundation hosts an international conference called Wikimania. This is a place for all the different projects to come together and discuss their experiences, learn from each other, and also discuss issues facing Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects going forwards. The official presentations at these conferences are usually all held in English, although sometimes there are parallel tracks in one other language, reflecting the location the conference is hosted (for example, Spanish in Latin America, and Chinese in Taiwan).

The informal communications happening outside of the planned tracks can of course be in any language, but for monolinguals, that is not of much help. An added challenge is that listening comprehension and ability to express ideas coherently orally is typically much more difficult to attain, than an ability to follow an argument in a written format. This means that even people with medium English-language skills can feel excluded from these discussions, may lack the self-confidence to speak up and contribute to a discussion, etc.

Problem statement

Thus, let me summarize. Wikipedia is a community project that strives to be democratic and participatory, both in the day to day minor decisions and management, but also in the larger policy issues. It is also a thoroughly international community, with a large percentage of users who do not speak English, or do not speak English well. Currently those users are able to participate fully at the individual Wikipedia level, but for all global discussions around the project as a whole – whose impact may often be felt in the day-to-day operation of the individual Wikipedias as well – are almost entirely conducted in English.

Wikipedia management and governance is a complicated issue, and there are certainly many who speak English perfectly, and still feel that participating is very difficult. It can be difficult to keep track of all the Talk pages and discussions going on at any point, many cannot afford to travel to Wikimania, or just prefer to spend their time contributing to the actual contents, rather than on long debates that might not lead to anything. Thus, this paper is not at all arguing that language skills present the only barrier to realizing full community participation. Much work should be done on discussing Wikipedia governance (and governance of large volunteer online projects) in general. However, language presents an additional obstacle that is almost insurmountable, even for the most savvy local administrator.

Solutions
It is not the intention of this paper to propose any finished solutions, because this is a thorny problem that can probably never be solved to a hundred percent satisfaction. Thus, the goals of this paper are two-fold. First of all, to raise awareness of this important issue, and second to begin a discussing, and propose some tentative ideas for ways to mitigate the issue.

To discuss this topic in a systematic fashion, it would have been useful to have some kind of a map of the different Wikipedia decision/participation processes. We would need to separate between day-to-day decisions (many of these occur at the individual Wiki-level, but there are others that may occur at a more global level – for example, which new Wiki to approve, who should be given admin, etc) and participating in the larger policy debate about Wikipedia’s direction (such as whether to shift to the Creative Commons license, whether to allow non-commercial pictures in Commons, whether to allow ads, etc).

It would also be very helpful to understand more about the demographics of those active in the local Wikipedias. Some of the people active in non-English Wikipedias speak excellent English (for example many people editing the Hindi Wikipedia might be students and professors in the US, but even Norwegians living in Norway will typically have little problem speaking English). Another large group have some ability to read/write English, but might still have problems participating fully. A third group have extremely limited or no English skills at all.

Below I will try to sketch out two categories of support that can be given to the two last categories, first for online communications, and then for conferences. This is very preliminary, and I am hoping for more feedback and ideas in this area.

Online communications

Crutches
For people who do have some knowledge of English, but still have problems fully participating, we might be able to provide some “crutches” to help them participate more fully. This is exactly my position in Chinese — I speak Chinese, and can read/write it, but read very slowly, and sometimes have problems formulating myself, etc. What would these crutches look like — what are the issues people with limited English skills face?

Reading comprehension is one, but the Internet has done a lot alleviate this, with all kinds of online dictionaries and reading aids, etc. However, another problem that I constantly run into, is that my reading speed in Chinese is so extremely much lower than my reading speed in English. In addition, I am not able to “skim” in Chinese. Only when you loose this ability, do you realize how much information you process habitually when scanning websites looking for interesting news, etc.

Thus, things that might be helpful to enable this category to participate more actively online, would be providing summaries of discussions in different languages, translating headlines of debates, etc. If someone can quickly scan through a list in their own language to see if there are any issues that interest them, they can then spend the time it takes to work through the text in English on that topic, using the online tools to their disposal. But without such an “indexing” service, it can seem almost overwhelming to even begin reading through the page.

People with low or no English abilities
For these people, it’s not a question of helping them to read English, it’s offering an alternative — ie. translation. However, how can this possibly be done by an organization that depends on voluntary labor, given the amount of languages to cover, and the amount of text that would need to be processed (much of which, it can seem, just consists of endless back-and-forths, that might be less than inspiring for even a motivated translator). There are a few possible ways of making this easier: we can reduce the amount of languages, reduce the amount of text, or make the translation work less demanding itself.

Reducing number of languages
Although there might be thousands of languages in the world, and several hundred represented on Wikipedia, many of these languages are closely related. To take my own language Norwegian, most Norwegians would be quite comfortable reading in Norwegian, Swedish or Danish, but would only themselves be able to write in Norwegian.

If we could thus determine that these three languages never had to be translated into each other, then everybody could write in Norwegian, Swedish or Danish, and content in other languages would be translated into one of these three. That already lightens the load considerably. There would need to be a lot of discussion about which languages this were possible for, some obvious that come to mind are Lao and Thai, Malay and Indonesian, Serbian and Croatian, Finnish and Estonian.

The North-Indian languages are written in different scripts, but using Google’s great transliteration engine you can now transliterate Bengali into Hindi (the words will still be somewhat different, but it’s possible that educated Indians would be comfortable with it). Perhaps Italian, Spanish and French (and Rumanian)? could be folded into one, etc. As I said, this is something that would have to be determined in consultation with all the language communities, although one would have to try to avoid too much politics interfering, people who refuse to understand their neighbours language for nationalistic reasons, etc.

One could probably also exclude a number of languages of countries where people are known to generally speak very good English (although we have to be very careful with this to avoid including only the elites). This is not a perfect or fair system, but we are not the UN and cannot hire thousands of translators, this is an attempt at ameliorating the existing sub-par situation.

Reducing amount of content
Even if there were people that were willing to make a contribution in translating a certain amount of material – how to choose? How to determine what is important and what is not? This is related to the above point in crutches, and figuring this out, might make participation in governance easier for everyone. We could also be better at parsing out important discussion questions into the various linguistic communities for them to discuss within themselves, and then have a summary brought to the international stage (although this could also be criticized for not enabling direct access to the international discussion.

Conferences
Conferences are in many ways more difficult than online communications. However, there are certainly many possibilities for “crutches”, whether one gets the Powerpoints translated ahead of time, and lets people download them (it’s much easier to follow along if you know what someone is talking about), or perhaps someone is typing summaries of what is being said on IRC in realtime. There is a lot of room for experimentation here. A final possibility would be to better integrate all the different local and regional conferences that are held, by trying to have the results or summaries published, and translated, having people blogging in different languages about what is going on, etc.

Conclusion
I hope I have convinced you that this is a really important question, and that although it is very thorny and does not have an easy solution, there are many ways in which we could improve on the existing condition. However, it’s imperative that we do this in consultation with all those who need this facilitation, and don’t “assume” what their needs might be. I look forward to meeting everyone at the conference, and hearing all of your ideas and feedback!

It varies how much I tweet from conferences (or in general), but during this conference, I found myself using Twitter quite frequently. It serves as both a note taking function, a way to communicate with some of the others in the room, a way to focus on the content of the talk (rather than letting thoughts wander), and a conduit for people who are not participating.

I am not sure how useful this collection of Tweets are for people who were not present, but I am posting them here as a collection. Earlier I posted the tweets from the OAI6 conference, and also mentioned how I created the list.

Here they are, all 130 of them:

• In Bangalore at Centre for Internet and Society for #wikiwars conference. Bangalore seems nice, a small-town busy feel.
• Just back from Avatar – good movie, but all the criticisms about the noble savage etc are right on. Looking forward to #wikiwars tmrw.
• @StevenWalling That’s kind of nice – new voices. I love Doctorow and Lessig, but we’ve all heard from them before. #wikiwars
• #wikiwars 3d wiki art installation – open space idea. First discussion starting: Wikipedia theory.
• #wikiwars “WP has gotten big enough that it deserves a research conference that is entirely external to WikiMedia Foundation.”
• Using new Google Live Search to follow #wikiwars updates in real-time (automatically updating) http://bit.ly/8Cvc1i (expand)
• Challenge @ #wikiwars: since we’ve all circulated 2k word abstracts, how to structure 15 min presentation to still be engaging to everyone?
• @ilya Cool, I’m very interested in Wikipedias in Indic languages. #wikiwars
• #wikiwars Stuart Geiger presenting on bots in WP governance. I find his work very interesting.
• #wikiwars Wisdom of crowds vs wisdom of bots?
• WP works bec. vandals outnumbered by good users? NO – 500-100 ppl banned every day! #wikiwars
• @tinucherian Cool! Random spot check: “Norway” 2 paras, but “Democracy” and “Physics” both good length. :) (Can’t check quality) #wikiwars
• #wikiwars @tinucherian Quick tool for checking articles in other languages http://bit.ly/7KmqJN (expand). Used it to check ML article length.
• #wikiwars Geiger: bots help reinstitute traditional features of the old style of production (gatekeepers, quality control, authority)
• #wikiwars Geiger: bot “nominated itself” for adminship – very convincing :) the machines are taking over! :)
• #wikiwars: Geiger: Are academics given epistemic roles in addition to academic. Do academics need to know coding to make headway in WP?
• #wikiwars Automatically redirect to the longest article in any of the official languages in India: http://pastebin.com/f5a21b4db
• @wirefire Yes, but is there any difference between stylistic choices in WP and other trad encyclopedias? #wikiwars
• #wikiwars Comment from audience: presentations give idea that Wikipedia is 1984′ish alienating modern nightmare…
• #wikiwars Geiger: Some of my best friends are bots. Pseudonymity is not equal to anonymity!
• “Do we need to know who has written something to be able to trust it? Or do we want to know who is it when we DON’T trust sb?” #wikiwars
• #wikiwars Wonder what the usage of bots is in other language versions (non-English)… Are there active bots on HI WP, ML WP?
• RT @thewikipedian: More @staeiou gems: I”f Wikipedia is a battleground, the footnotes [citations] are the bullets.” #wikiwars
• #wikiwars Dror: Syrians much more sensitive abt what is in Arabic Wikipedia, than English. I think the Chinese feel the same abt ZH WP.
• @williambeutler (Abt Nandi and French quote). I’m all for that. Maybe I’ll give my entire prez tomorrow in Indonesian. #wikiwars
• Lot’s of interesting epistemological discussions at #wikiwars, is there objective knowledge? is NPOV possible? 很有意思的认识论的讨论 – 中立的知识存在吗?
• @gkjohn 5:30 I think. There’s a dinner at 7:30, maybe you could sneak in :) #wikiwars
• #wikiwars Dror: Wikipedia exposed me to new ideas/facts that I didn’t hear in “politically correct” school.
• #wikiwars Dror: It _is_ possible to get near objective knowledge, and it’s needed in conflict topics, we shouldn’t just give up!
• #wikiwars Question: What would you do if WP wasn’t there? Answer: It _wasn’t_ there…
• Dror: When learning Arabic, talking to A-speakers, amazed how different our knowledge was. Excited by WP – this is what we needed! #wikiwars
• #wikiwars Internet as a distributed network, and Wikipedia as _one_ place.
• #wikiwars Are articles about Pokemon frivolous/don’t matter? Should this disqualify from adminship?
• #wikiwars Dror: Difference between writing _about_ a narrative, and adopting it. We can and should do the first, and not the second.
• #wikiwars Dror: East and West cult. difference of neutrality and objectivity? When working w/ Arab editors, noticed difference in standards.
• #wikiwars Dror: Do we not only need different language versions, but also WPs written from different epistemic traditions?
• @cormaggio you would have been an obvius guest. although exclusively wp, not all wmf projs. #wikiwars
• #wikiwars very excited abt #hfordsa talk. disillusioned, next 8 yrs to work out what went wrong. want more impact in dev’l countries
• #wikiwars cc as political artefact, and what are the other options?
• #wikiwars lessig: ways of regulating: market, law, norms, artefacts. which work better where?
• #wikiwars no more laptop batt, using ipod. i suck at typing fast
• #wikiwars sunil and hfordsa are both disillusioned/critical of open movenents. hm, what are alternatives? how do we move forward?
• #wikiwars hfordsa: by choosing cc we’re reinforcing copyright, commodification of culture…?
• @ilya I’ve made a list for #WikiWars. See http://twitter.com/jackerhack/wikiwars. (via @jackerhack)
• #wikiwars @hfordsa sth i wrote earlier related to encouraging sharing w/o bogged down w/ law http://bit.ly/71lFdi (expand)
• #wikiwars A very interesting first day is over. A lot of criticism about openness, licenses. The idea of an objective truth.
• #wikiwars Quite a few things that I will pick up in my presentation tomorrow. Great with so much time for debate and questions!
• I dreamt I was invited to give a presentation about open licenses and OER to a primary school assembly. Weird. #wikiwars
• #wikiwars Ready for day two of WikiWars. Today – with power! :) May the games begin.
• #wikiwars “It’s scary that we all agree that we need to be critical to Wikipedia?” Being critical doesn’t mean being negative…
• RT @thewikipedian: I’ve heard of “greenwashing” and recently, “localwashing”, but @sunil_abraham offers a new one: “openwashing” #wikiwars
• #wikiwars @sunil_abraham: You kill local/traditional knowledge by encoding it?
• #wikiwars Sunil: Apparently Bangalore hasn’t changed name to Bengaluuru yet, lost in bureaucracy and politics. Surprising.
• #wikiwars Dror: Is there a consensus in this panel that Wikipedia is _not_ a revolution?
• #wikiwars Geert: WP is traditional in its understand of what knowledge is. Very biased towards Western idea. Epistemological and geographic.
• #wikiwars I don’t see the geographical divide as critical. It can be solved by added more articles – rather than fundamentally changing.
• #wikiwars Stuart: Revolution is an empty signifier.
• #wikiwars “Trying to defend wiki part by clinging to the pedia part.”
• RT @hfordsa: ‘Wikipedia might be revolutionary but not in the way that Wikipedia defines itself’ NishantShah #wikiwars
• @fuzheado You guys should do a Wikipedia Weekly episode on the #WikiWars conference going on in Bangalore. Lot’s of interesting discussions.
• #wikiwars Apparently Indian teachers want handwritten instead of printed, to avoid copy+paste. Interesting.
• RT @wirefire: http://bit.ly/71BHKK (expand) — how often does Indian law refer to wikipedia? Shocking revelations #wikiwars
• Sad how many people could not make it to #wikiwars. But still a great crowd.
• #wikiwars @williambeutler Starts presentation about why people join/leave WP, and what to do about it. Doors and windows. Or sth.
• #wikiwars Bill: Who reads WP? Most people. But very low WP literacy – how does project work, talk pages, warning tags, etc.
• #wikiwars Bill: Hard to how many contribute to WP. Most edits by small amnt of ppl, but if those are only tiny changes, does it mean anyth?
• #wikiwars Bill: Look at a few articles – most edit counts, made smallest contrib. Biggest contrib by accts that did not have many edits.
• #wikiwars Bill: more reasons to leave WP than to stay there.
• #wikiwars Bill: 50 policies, 150+ site guidelines, advisory essays. WP is _complicated_. (ENWP, what about other langs? Less bureaucracy?)
• #wikiwars Bill: Some people who leave Wikipedia leave “suicide notes”.
• #wikiwars Any good working tools to animate WP edit history? Most tools here http://waxy.org/2005/06/automating_wiki/ broken links.
• #wikiwars Ilya: Re-appropriating WP, lazy people’s archive? LAM sector in Taiwan.
• #wikiwars My bad, Ilya is not about LAM sector in Taiwan. That’s another guy.
• @zimmee Was just repeating speaker’s word. But it’s an interesting concept to let an “online persona” “die”… #wikiwars
• #wikiwars Great to finally have sb talk about other language WPs… (One earlier also studied German WP).
• #wikiwars Ilya: Story of zh-min-nan Wikipedia.
• #wikiwars Ilya: What is “Chinese”? ISO code only given for Mandarin, written language. How to write Taiwanese w/o characters? Holopedia…
• #wikiwars Ilya: Purchased Holopedia.org, installed Mediawiki (OSS), couldn’t update software easily, couldn’t connect to other langs in WP.
• #wikiwars Ilya: Interesting – early paper-drawn prototype of Holopedia, zh-minnan WP.
• #wikiwars Ilya: Decide to use certain transcription/writing system (dev’l by missionaries). Apply to WP again, accepted in 2004/2005.
• #wikiwars Ilya: Pan-Chineselization vs indep. langs. Relation with Taiwanese independence movement? Reductionism. Cultural revitalization.
• #wikiwars Input method is not method, web browser not just tool, localization get you globalized, fonts should be better than its terms (?)
• #wikiwars Ilya: a number of Chinese dialect WPs emerge.
• #wikiwars Ilya: Toward FormosanPedia… Me: But WPs are supposed to be by language, not by territory?
• #wikiwars Tsou: Why Taiwan doesn’t like WP? New presentation starting.
• #wikiwars Tsou: We all use WP academically, but we are required to “remove all traces”.
• #wikiwars Tsou: Strawberry generation in TW (“we don’t all look like this”). Born after 1981, self-indulgent, credit cards, disobedient.
• #wikiwars Tsou: My teachers used to beat me often, for me it was natural. Now they record on handcamera, and upload online.
• #wikiwars Tsou: Current generation didn’t go through proper brainwashing process, lack committment!
• #wikiwars Tsou: Brought up in greenhouse environment. Beautiful, fragile. High maintenance. Low frustration tolerance.
• #wikiwars Tsou: When growing up, only taught mainland hist. and geo. We called ourselves “Chinese”. Now different. Nat’l identity contested.
• RT @MadanRao: “Strawberry generation”: – I always love these cultural metaphors! Wonder what fruits apply to other cultures? #WikiWars
• #wikiwars Tsou: All turning into 穷忙族, poor while being busy, busily being poor.
• #wikiwars Tsou: They actually have a Chinese language “Uncyclopedia”! Neat! Kuso – means “shit” or poor quality in Japanese.
• #wikiwars Tsou: lovetaiwan.jpg Picture of a Chinese character shaped as swastika – resistance toward pervasive concept of patriotism?
• #wikiwars Tsou: Our encyclopedia is “contaminated” by Chinese Uncyclopedia – people write vulgar things, and it isn’t revised/removed.
• #wikiwars Presentation is over. I love these international perspectives. So many rich local cultures represented! Now panel discussion.
• #wikiwars Audience: What have you meant by resistance? Resistance to what? Nishant: Read our website :)
• #wikiwars Maybe Wikipedia needs an “exit interview” to find out why people leave. Sometimes intentional, sometimes just fades away?
• #wikiwars Dror: Countries with more leisure culture contribute more?
• #wikiwars Tsou: Our education system doesn’t encourage us to do anything outside of the “rules”. That’s why “uncyclopedia” is interesting.
• #wikiwars Tsou: Ppl post things on WP, deleted, then on Uncyclopedia. “Why deleted? It’s a good point!” But no orig rsrch allowed.
• #wikiwars Nishant: Not apathy towards politics, but towards politics as we understand it currently. WP falls into “flat, boring concept”
• #wikiwars Nishant: Uncyclopedia shows – not a crisis of leisure time. But they don’t choose to spend their time on what “we want them to”.
• #wikiwars Q: Why do ppl choose to edit Holopedia, not zhwp? Even if I’m TW, might still not match my daily language experience.
• #wikiwars “Language is continuous, not discontinuous, but we have to chunk it somehow. Trad: nationally. How do we deal w/this in WP?”
• #wikiwars Delicious lunch. Now my session is coming up. Will post audio+slides, think it will also be videotaped.
• #wikiwars Zimmerman. Finally sb. makes distinc. betw. information and knowledge. Knowledge is constructed in our minds, info can be shared.
• #wikiwars Zimmerman: You need to distinguish between anonymity and pseudonymity. Huge difference!
• #wikiwars Zimmerman. The old idea that Google and WP are making us stupid. I’m not convinced at all.
• #wikiwars Zimmerman: Have we lost sense of personal identity? — Wikipedia is collaborative, but tweets, blogs, homepages, etc?
• #wikiwars Zimmerman. Isn’t this what Citizendium tried? They’re not exactly racing alone…
• #wikiwars Niesyto: Wikipedia as Translingual Space
• #wikiwars Niesyto: List of 1000 articles that every WP should have. Too American/Western. “Edit each other’s biases out of the list”.
• #wikiwars Niesyto: Translingual dimension is somewhat “hidden”… Most people don’t think about it.
• #wikiwars Niesyto: Actually did interviews w/ multilingual users, very interesting. Like to visit other WPs, even if they don’t understand.
• #wikiwars Niesyto: Translation is betrayal… Have locally appropriate knowledge in each wiki?
• #wikiwars Just finished my presentation. Wow that was fast. IPod pinged at 15 mins just as I was on the last slide. Waiting for pushback :)
• RT @ilya: Stian 的演講給了在場的人們一劑強心針，尤其是開場的中文。不只我與其他的中文與會者，許多認同語言行動態度的與會者都拍手鼓掌。 #WikiWars
• #wikiwars My presentation Equitable governance of multilingual WP posted: http://bit.ly/64vecM (expand). Audio and video(?) will be added later.
• RT @hfordsa: Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern:’Wikipedia Art lives on because of its death’ http://wikipediaart.org/ #wikiwars
• Fascinating to what extent elephants became a topic/metaphore of the day at #wikiwars. U subscribe 2 1-elephant or multipl-elephant theory?
• #wikiwars At the next conf, we should make all presentations with puppets.
• #wikiwars Artists talking about embodiment. Usually turns me off – but they make it meaningful.
• #wikiwars Focus on details – because it’s beautiful. Interacting with real materials, and with other people. And in a structure.
• #wikiwars But general shape not pleasant. Like WP, we always see it “zoomed in”, not from a distance?
• #wikiwars Wonder when I’ll see most of the ppl in this room again? At Wikimania in Poland?
• #wikiwars We interacted with artwork in framework of wiki, but also used in other kinds of confs, which framed it differently.
• Thanks to @cis_india, the speakers, participants and just about everyone at #wikiwars Hope to see you again :) (via @Srikeit)
• Annotated video of #WikiWars will soon be on PADMA http://pad.ma Official summaries, PPTs also on CIS site www.cis-india.org (via @MadanRao)

Stian

It’s incredible the stuff you can find on the internet, how everything is linked together. So I’m in our little apartment in Beijing trying to clean up before my wife comes back, and put on a collection of Norwegian 60’s music which I have downloaded. The first song is cute, the story of some woman living on a little conservative place in Norway, and getting called to church by the “council for high moral”, because she was wearing too low-cut dresses. But she ends up teaching them all a lesson.

I thought the song was cute, so I wanted to know more. I googled a line of the song, and found out that it was called Fru Johnsen (Mrs. Johnsen), and was written by Terje Mosnes and performed by the still famous Anne Lise Rypdal in 1967. Apparently it caused enough consternation that it was for a period banned from playing on the national broadcaster (lyric here, video here).

However, this song wasn’t original – in fact, it was an adaptation of a very well-known American country song called “Harper Valley PTA” (Wikipedia entry). This song was written by Tom T. Hall, and performed by Jeannie C. Riley, but has still been covered many times, including by Dolly Parton, and recently in an episode of Desperate Housewives! The story is roughly similar, although here our heroine is up against a small-town PTA (parents-teachers association). One video is here, lyrics here.

But, we’re still not done! Because according to the Wikipedia-entry above, it was also adapted into a Swedish version, called Fröken Fredriksson (Ms. Fredriksson). I think this was originally performed by the Hootenanny Singers (a Swedish group), but later it was covered by the well-known ABBA. In this song, the story is quite different – the young unfortunate miss is seen watering plants in a nightie that is opened by the wind. Shocked by this sight, her busybody neighbor begins spreading rumors, and Fredriksson eventually has to leave town – right after calling out her neighbor as a hypocrite. The song can be heard here, and the lyrics are here.

It’s a fun song to listen to, and it was a fun story to unravel. I love the ability of the Internet to bring together many different cases, and analyze them together. When the song came out, probably few in Norway had ever heard the “original”, and if they wanted to listen to it, they would depend on it being offered for sale in Norwegian record stores. Now, it just takes a few minutes to find it.

It’s also interesting how the versions differ. I listened to a lecture at the University of Oslo once, by an anthropologist who also played in a punk rock band, he had spent time researching the punk culture in Korea. He made the point that by looking at what the songs protest against, you can learn something about the culture. In England and the US, the songs are often against the “system”, the “man”, the government, the police. In Korea, it was more often against ones own parents, and the schools.

Thus, in the Norwegian version, the church is the oppressor, but in the US, it’s a more generalized small-town oppressiveness. And the Swedish one (if it’s really a remake, you can’t always trust Wikipedia), it’s common people’s pettiness. However, that’s also the saddest one, because in the other two, the protagonist gets the upper hand in the end, and “shows them all”, whereas in the Swedish, she is still forced to leave town.

Update, I found a version from the film/tv series that was built on the song:

Listen and enjoy.

Stian

I started with MIT, talked about OpenCourseWare Consortium, and then the dScribes model at University of Michigan. I mentioned University of Oslo, that makes all their curricula available freely as a service to students, without ever thinking that it could be defined “OER”. I talked about the biggest university in the world, Indira Gandhi National Open University, and their incredible resources in eGyanKosh and on Youtube.

Staying in India, I mentioned the Youtube collection of the IITs. Then I talked about Open University UK, China’s Open Educational Resources, Wikiversity, Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, Indian open textbooks and Indonesian open textbooks. I introduced a Norwegian project that is funding the production of high school educational materials in a very novel way, Free High School Science Texts in South Africa, Flat World Knowledge, Open High School of Utah, and finally I did a brief introduction of Peer2Peer University.

The entire presentation was recorded with Adobe Connect, and can be seen here, with both audio and slides synchronized. Since that doesn’t work for everyone, I also put up an MP3 of the presentation, and put the slides on Slideshare.

A lot of this is new ground, and in some cases I don’t know all the details behind these projects and the decisions they have made. If you have any examples of other interesting models for OER projects, or you want to correct anything I stated in the presentation, I’d love to hear from you.

Stian

From L'Actualité, November 15, 2009

In September, someone called from L’Actualité, a weekly magazine based in Montreal, and wanted to interview me about Peer2Peer University. The final article keeps mentioning us in the same sentence as University of the People, whereas I think we are quite different, but it’s great to get the word out to the over one million readers (according to Wikipedia). You can read the entire article by clicking on the picture thumbnail, and I’ve also pasted in the OCRed version after the break.

Inventez votre propre université

Pas de salles de cours, pas d’équipe de football, pas de vaste campus gazonné et, souvent, pas de… professeurs! Bienvenue à la Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) et à la University 0f the People (UoPeople), deux établissements entièrement virtuels, gratuits et ouverts à tous.

Depuis septembre, un peu plus de 300 étudiants; dans une cinquantaine de pays, suivent des cours universitaires par Internet. Mais à la différence des Téluq et autres programmes d’études offerts sur le Web, ceux de la UoPeople et de la P2PU s’appuient d’abord sur la collaboration entre les étudiants plutôt que sur l’enseignement magistral prodigué par un professeur.

Chaque étudiant doit donc mettre la main à la… souris. Sous la supervision d’un enseignant bénévole, les étudiants montent les cours, préparent les “recueils de notes” et animent les discussions. Le tout en anglais. “Nous assemblons notre matériel à partir de ce qui existe déjà”, dit Shai Reshef, fondateur et recteur de la University of the People. “Nos étudiants utilisent les possibilités qu’offrent les nouvelles technologies et toutes les ressources mises en ligne gratuitement par les universités traditionnelles.”

Il n’est d’ailleurs pas question de remplacer ces universités, “mais d’offrir aux étudiants une solution de rechange”, précise Stian Haklev, Norvégien d’origine qui vit aujourd’hui à Toronto et cofondateur de la Peer 2 Peer University. Objectif: rendre la formation universitaire accessible au plus grand nombre, et ce, dans le monde entier.

Le nombre de programmes et de cours offerts est encore restreint, ils vont des traditionnels programmes d’administration des affaires et d’informatique, à la UoPeople, aux cours — moins classiques — de neuroéthique, de droits d’auteur pour enseignants, de littérature cyberpunk ainsi que de poker et pensée créative, à la P2PU.

Tous les cours sont gratuits. La University of the People exige toutefois des frais liés à l’admission et à l’administration des examens. Même si aucune des deux universités ne délivre de diplôme officiel, les étudiants espèrent que la formation suivie les aidera à trouver du travail. Les cours ne peuvent pas non plus être crédités dans une autre université. Mais les deux établissements y travaillent, assurent leurs fondateurs.

Given that there are these large databases of strings translated into different languages out there, I wondered if I could use that as an addition to a dictionary. I am pretty sure I am not the first to have this idea, in fact, I seem to remember some website where you could search translation strings, but I don’t remember where I found that. Anyway, I decided to give it a try.

First I had to find the files. I began by downloading some Debian localization packages, but then remembered that in the finished product, the files (with .mo extension) have been “compiled”, so that the program can access them more rapidly, and are not plain text anymore. There might be tools that can extract the strings from the .mo files, but it’s much easier to go straight to the “source”, and get the localization projects from the SVN repository.

KDE has very nice and helpful pages for their translation teams, for example the page for simplified Chinese tells me clearly how I should go about to download this project, simply enter the command:

svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/
trunk/l10n-kde4/zh_CN/messages

and a bit over a thousand files will be downloaded, with names like koffice/kivio.po. After some initial metadata, these files look like this:

#: rc.cpp:28
msgctxt "Stencils"
msgid "Assorted"
msgstr "杂类"

#: rc.cpp:29
msgctxt "Stencils"
msgid "Electric"
msgstr "电子"

#: rc.cpp:30
msgctxt "Stencils"
msgid "Network"
msgstr "网络"

There is some metadata about where in the code this string comes from, then the key string in English, which will be the same in all translation projects, and then the translation into Chinese. If all we wanted was an English-Chinese dictionary, it would be quite easy to run some regexps to compile this data. However, we would like to make a dictionary of for example Norwegian and Chinese. The corresponding Norwegian file looks like this:

#: rc.cpp:28
msgctxt "Stencils"
msgid "Assorted"
msgstr "Diverse"

#: rc.cpp:29
msgctxt "Stencils"
msgid "Electric"
msgstr "Elektrisk"

#: rc.cpp:30
msgctxt "Stencils"
msgid "Network"
msgstr "Nettverk"

So I wrote a simple program that takes two paths, and opens every file in those two paths, and you can download that script here. If you download the Chinese files into a directory called zh, and the Norwegian files into a directory called no, you can run the program like this:

ruby extract.rb no/messages zh/messages > nozh.data

and you get a file containing more than a 100,000 lines like this:

…which is what we were looking for. You can then easily grep this file to find words you are looking for – many of which won’t be in normal dictionaries (especially not Chinese-Norwegian or Esperanto-Urdu or whatever interesting combinations you cook up).

This script can be used for any language combinations, with one caveat. Right now, it is hardcoded to only accept entries that contain at least one Chinese character from the second file, because there is now point to get an entry telling you that XML in Norwegian is XML in Chinese. I do that by adding this:

trans[0][0] =~ /[⾰-⾿]/

which is a regular expression that checks for the existence of Chinese characters. You'd want to remove that, if you were not using it with Chinese.

Stian
PS: I realize that calling this a "dictionary" is perhaps not very accurate, they are collocated sentences, not words. However, if the target language is a language that you speak a bit of, you can very often easily isolate the word you are looking for.

That was last week, this week they talked to a number of people, but they also played a really neat rap song about children who feel trapped between two cultures. They are called Karpe Diem, and were established in 2000. The group consists of Magdi Omar Ytreeide Abdelmaguid, Chirag Rashmikant Patel og DJ Marius Thingvald. I ended up buying two CDs by them on iTunes store, which is my first music purchase from iTunes. But I figured I wanted to support them, and iTunes doesn’t do DRM anymore, which was important to me.

To share them with you, I found the song that was played in the program, and I’ve embedded it below. I will also paste in the Norwegian lyrics, and translate them to English. Enjoy.

We determine who we are by what we look like. And when we look in the mirrors like this, we ask ourself a question: Who am I? Wo am I on this jurney called life? Who am I? I hope, that you haven’t bought into the idea that you are what you look like, or your worth is determined by what your outwards appearance looks like. Or about what you do.

I hope, that you figured out by now, that if you lived you life that way, you would constibly be looking at you self, and be thinking “I am not good enough. I’m not tall enough. I’m not buff enough. I’m not pretty enough, I am not beautiful enough. I’m not anybody.”

Er både svart og hvit, er både glad og trist, er både fattig og rik, en dåre valkemist

Is both black and white, is both happy and sad, is both poor and rich, a fool valkemist

Er både ja til slå tilbake, og pasifist og. Du tror du kjenner meg, for du kanskje visste at jeg er både svart og hvitt, jeg er både glad og trist, jeg er både fattig og rik, en dåre valkemist. Er både ja til slå tilbake, og pasifist og. Du tror du kjenner meg, for du kanskje visste at:

Is both yes to hit back, and pacifist, and. You think you know, because maybe you knew that I am both black and white, I am both happy and sad, I am both poor and rich, a fool valkemist. Is both yes to hit back, and pacifist, and. You think you know me, because maybe you knew that:

han er halv norsk, han er halvt egypter
Han går på fester, han er alltid nykter
Han bor hos faren sin, han bor hos mamma
Han spiser brunost, falefel og shawarma

he is half Norwegian, he is half Egyptian
he goes to parties, he is always sober
he lives with his father, he lives with mum
he eats goatcheese, falafel and shawarma

Han bor i åsen, (Hei) han bor i blokk, (men)
han kan arabisk, han snakker norsk
Men han er brun, hei please; han er hvit!
Han feirer jul, det er høytid når det er hit

He lives in the hill, (hi) he lives in a high-rise, (but)
he speaks Arabic, he speaks Norwegian
but he is brown, hey please, he is white!
he celebrates Christmas, it’s holiday when it’s Eid

men han er rik, kom igjen a; han er fattig!
Hei, han er hvit, nei, se på’n; han er svarting!
han ser fordeler, og han ser ulemper
Han er hva du sier, han veit hva du tenker
Og her hjemme, kaller de han utlending
og der borte, kaller de han utlending

but he is rich, now come on, he is poor!
Hey, no he is white, no, look at him, he’s a nigger!
he sees advantages, and he sees disadvantages
he is what you say, he knows what you think
and here at home, they call him foreigner
and over there, they call him foreigner

Men vi er enig om at vi blir fresh selv om identitet lett dreper med en strek mellom.

But we agree that we become fresh, even if identity can easily kill by drawing a line between.

Stian

For various reasons, the book made me think of a lot of different topics. It made me think of many other ethnographic studies that I read during my undergrad, and how I often had the feeling: “is this all you came up with?” The book has some interesting points, but it still seems little after a year of immersing oneself in a community – furthermore a community of which she already had some knowledge. From her own comments, it seems that she decided not to use a large amount of her collected materials, because of concern with ethics.

Ethics

Which leads me to the question of research ethics, which is something I have thought a lot about recently – not the least having had to go through the Ethical Review Board protocol myself for my field work in China. I was curious to see how the ethics of her fieldwork was received, and I found a long – and quite vitriolic – debate in the comment field under an article by Inside Higher Ed. Most of the people on the list had not yet read the book – nor did they know (until towards the end of the comment thread) her real identity. Most readers were appalled at her use of deception (not telling the other students that she was doing research), although she did use informed consent for her formal interviews, and her IRB approved of the research.

One of the things that surprised me was that she chose to do the research at her own campus. It might have been closer to home, and easier to organize from the university, but it seems to make things much more complicated. I am surprised that she wasn’t recognized more, for a university with only 10,000 students, although from what she describes, it’s very large and dispersed, and perhaps the anthropologi professors just drive to the anthro building, and stay there. If she had been at UofT Scarborough, she would have ran into colleagues all the time. In addition, it is much easier to discover which university she talked about, and she will probably run into students she lived with (especially since they were freshman, and had three years left), maybe even teach some of them, or meet them in other capacities.

I failed to find any serious discussion about the ethics of her approach (the debate mentioned above was high on temper, low on facts), which would have been interesting – but clearly it worked out, since she is not only still in her job, but also has been travelling around and lecturing about the student experience.

I think that the demand for anonymity, for example, sometimes goes too far — or is unworkable. I remember another example of a student at my school who was working as a teacher (many of our students are part-time, mid-career). She wrote her thesis on the process of internationalizing the curriculum at her school. She would change the name of the school, but of course, everyone could google her and find out where she lived — and anyone involved at that school could look up her thesis, and that is probably what’s the most relevant. Another recent example is a student who just defended her PhD thesis, and presented on it in our class (taught by her supervisor). She discussed the policies toward internationalization by two different universities, one in Ontario and one in British Columbia. According to her supervisor: “We all understand that this refers to X and Y university, because of their characteristics, but for ethical reasons, we couldn’t name them in the thesis”. What ethical reasons, if anyone familiar with the Canadian context can immediately deduce which universities are in question?

I guess my biggest problem with elaborate ERB protocols is that they do exactly the opposite of what they are supposed to do: incite debate, reflection and continued care. Instead, with their 20 page protocols that take months to get through, people focus on writing to get approved, not daring to take chances with new research methods, for example, because it might delay their project for too long. Instead of allowing you to go to a new country, spend time understanding the situation deeper, and then modifying your research plan accordingly, it binds you to a rigid structure, or forces you to go through months waiting to have the new proposal approved. It would be interesting with studies of how people have modified their research designs to be “safe”, to not challenge the review board, because they cannot risk having their approval delayed. I’d also like to know about the implementation of the ethics requirements across Canada, I know they are based on the tri-councils who fund research in Canada, but it would be interesting to look at how interpretation and execution differs across institutions.

In January this year, University Affairs reported that there were changes afoot to make the ethics process more responsive to the concern of social science researchers, whereas it traditionally has been very much oriented towards the biomedical sciences and their concerns. It will be interesting to see the changes, and how quickly they trickle down to the institutional level.

Stian
Picture from Office of Research and Sponsored Programs, St. Catherine University.