I have always been very interested in languages, and I am lucky enough to be able to speak a few. My mother tongue is Norwegian, but I also speak for example Italian, Spanish, Esperanto, Chinese and Indonesian. And English of course.

What language to use on the web is a tricky question. And some might consider me a bit of a hypocrite. I feel very strongly about linguistic diversity, and am all about encouraging Chinese, Hindi speakers and Norwegians to blog in their own languages, to create more web content in the languages less represented on the web. At the same time, I obviously understand the desire to reach out and be read by people all over the world. Personally, almost all my web activity is in English. I blog in English (I have had two different blogs in Chinese, but gave up when the only comment I ever got was “oh, so cute, your Chinese is really good”, and never about what I was writing about). I mostly edit English Wikipedia (although I have made contributions to the Norwegian, Indonesian and Chinese). I also do most of my reading in English (although I read some Norwegian dailies and blogs, and some Chinese). When I google for something, I always google in English – unless there is strong reason to expect there to more material in another language.

This is why a recent post on My learning journey, talking about how she had dived into the German webosphere, and found many interesting sites, resonated with me. I should probably spend more time surfing around in different linguistic blogospheres, but I feel I am already spending too much time on the net… One neat tool I came up with to encourage myself to be more linguistically diverse, is connected to Wikipedia. I usually look up a topic on English Wikipedia, because it usually has the longer, more complete articles – however I would be completely capable to check out the article in other languages. This tool automatically redirects you to the longest Wikipedia page on a given topic, given a range of languages that you speak.

Here is an example of usage: http://reganmian.net/bigger/en/no,da,sv,de,it/Democracy This url says: I speak Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, German and Italian – give me the longest article you have on what in English is called Democracy. (This might seem very inconvenient, but if you save it as a keyword in Firefox, like http://reganmian.net/bigger/en/no,da,sv,de,it/%s, you can later type something like “bigger Frankenstein”, and it automatically redirects you.

One thing I would love to find though, are good websites in these languages where people “sum up” significant developments and trends in the national blogosphere for me. Often what I find, is people summing up the debates on Slashdot or Digg for the national audience – which is the last thing I want.

By the way, I am currently looking for examples of international students or faculty being encouraged to conducted research/publish in their home languages – any sources would be very welcome.

Stian
Thanks to Gaetan Lee @ flickr for the image, licensed under CC BY

Image via Wikipedia

I am doing a course on global governance and educational change, and we have been going through standard theories of political science and international relations theory. This week, we had to write a reflection paper to apply some of these theories on a topic of our choosing, to prove that we had understood them. I chose to write an imagined (and exaggerated) dialogue about the MIT Open CourseWare. Don’t take this too seriously, and none of these necessarily reflect my own views.

The International Debate on the MIT Open CourseWare

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Economist’s annual policy maker debate hosted at Oxford University. This year we will be presenting the statement “MIT Open CourseWare and similar projects help promote educational equality in the world, and should be promoted”. We have a distinguished panel tonight. Our first section will focus on the national American context, and Professor Compensatory Liberal will go first.

Professor Compensatory Liberal: Dear attendees, I support today’s statement. America benefits from its wide variety of educational providers, both private and public, and we are proud of the diversity and entrepreneurialism evident in our educational system. However, there are large groups that are under-served and lack access to high-quality education, whether this is due to financial difficulties, or an inflexible life-situation. Making high-quality courses from one of America’s premier institutions available to these citizens will go a long way in compensating for this lack of access, and will hopefully set an example that other institutions can follow.

Professor Pure Liberal: I disagree with this statement. Having a large and diverse body of educational providers, including public, private and for-profit actors, is – as my esteemed colleague stated – one of the strengths of our nation. It is quite appropriate that educational services should come at a cost, because they are very expensive to provide, and it is fair – countless studies have shown that gaining a college degrees is an investment that pays for itself several times in increased lifetime income. The state has decided to subsidy a part of this cost, because the positive externality of increasing the educational level of the population is so high that without a subsidy, less education would be consumed than is socially optimal. However, providing education for free completely distorts the market place, and risks putting for-profit providers out of business, and decreasing the competition in the market, thus hurting the consumer.

Professor Pure Liberal 2: Esteemed colleague, I respectfully disagree. While all your premises are well stated, you do not accurately consider the function of MIT Open CourseWare. Since MIT does not provide accreditation, which is what most educational consumers ultimately seek, MIT OCW does not compete with other educational providers. Instead, it provides very valuable functions for MIT. Primarily, it is a marketing tool, which has helped shore up MIT’s reputation as the “gold standard” for engineering training in the world. 60% of all incoming students cite MIT OCW as a factor in their choosing the institution. Internally, the courses are also very helpful to students selecting classes, or wanting to review material. Therefore, MIT OCW is a shrewd strategy from MIT to better position themselves in the market, and compete for students. This is a legitimate part of doing business, and something we should be supporting.

Professor Socialist: First to the previous speaker, I resent the notion that education is a good to be consumed. Education in a socialist society would be a human right. The education provided at MIT however, is an elite education for the capitalist managerial class which is completely inaccessible to the working class. The OCW project is simply a ploy to detract attention from the fact that working class children are excluded from attending MIT, and taking advantage from close interaction with professors, experience working in labs, the participation in learning communities, etc. This kind of quality education will always be unavailable to ordinary students in a capitalist system.

Professor Socialist 2: Esteemed colleague, I respect your views, but in this case I will have to disagree. You speak almost enviously of MIT as high quality education. Remember that universal education was instituted to socialize children into workers who could show up on time, work sustained for long periods of time, and not question authority. It is true that transformatory learning based on for example the Freirian model can be a powerful act of resistance in a capitalist society, however what MIT does is to take the most creative youth and mold them into model workers for the “innovation economy”. Their newest project to spread their educational materials to everyone, is simply a ploy to get working class men and women studying and improving their skills for free in their own time, which will benefit the companies they work for, but not themselves.

Well, we thank you for your views on MIT Open CourseWare in the American context. Now we are widening the scope of the debate, to consider the impact of MIT Open CourseWare on the international stage, and we have a mix of American and international contributors. Professor American Realist?

Professor Liberal Internationalist: Every human being in the world has an equal right to education and personal development. The current situation is that educational opportunities are very inequitably distributed throughout the world, and in many countries youth lack access to quality higher education. As a world community, we need to come together to pull up those who need it. The MIT OCW is a wonderful project that let’s anyone in the world be a “fly on the wall” of the MIT, and radically widens access to one of the world’s premier research and teaching institutions. Hopefully many similar projects will be created, so that we will have a chance of reaching the Millenium Development Goals.

Professor American Realist: If this project was simply available inside America, using a similar license to the one developed in the Australian school system, which limits usage to the national context, the situation would be very different. Strengthening the human capital in the US, leading to a strengthening of both the commercial productivity, and perhaps also our armies would certainly be a laudable objective. However, America’s educational system, the best in the world, is a key to our national competitiveness on the world stage. By making these resources available internationally, you are undermining our key advantage, and in extremis threatening the global American hegemony that preserves world peace and our prosperity.

Professor American Realist 2: While I wholeheartedly agree with the assessment made by my colleague, I wanted to add that security, and failed states, is a large concern for us at the moment. If it could somehow be shown that MIT OCW could increase the human capital in conflict zones, and reduce the probability for conflict, even by a small amount, this would be something quite support-worthy. Of course, access should not be extended to the whole world, but only to the areas that national defence and security dictate that we help.

Professor Australian Pure Liberal: I want to reiterate the concern that my colleague Professor Pure Liberal espoused earlier. The international trade in educational services is one of the fastest rising sectors of the economy, and one that brings benefits both to exporting countries and importing countries. These free resources constitute an unfair challenge to our producers of learning materials who have contributed so much to the increase of quality learning opportunities in the Asia-Pacific region, and serves to incalculate in people the belief that very expensive learning resources ought to be free, thus undermining future increases in this global trade.

Professor Neo-institutionalist: There is already a trend of increasing convergence among educational systems in different nation states, as they tend to align themselves with the “imagined community” of the global modern society. Programs such as MIT OCW make important contributions to this process, by sharing the “gold standard” educational materials, which help shape expectations around curriculum among universities, students and lecturers.

In fact, Chinese universities have produced more than 250 book-length comparative reports on the differences between MIT OCW curricula and the curricula taught in Chinese schools, with the express purpose to improve the quality of education in China to “international standards”. Indeed, not only the educational content itself, but also the pedagogical methods and lecture styles are being transmitted through the videos available, and many professors in developing countries have reported modifying their own teaching based on this. Such a global convergence towards a “gold standard” is a natural and positive process, and MIT OCW is a wonderful contribution to this.

Professor Latin-American World-system Theorist: The previous speaker analyses the world without any relevant historical context, and presents a fairy-tale view of the global processes that actually take place. Research, scholarly publishing, and top university education is concentrated in the Anglo-Saxon centre of the world, all conducted in the English language according to a certain epistemology and grounded in a system of production. The MIT OCW has two distinct very negative effects on the developing countries of the world. Firstly, it legitimizes MIT as the global leader in teaching, and the material and knowledge that they are transmitting as the material “most worth knowing”, which will “help us” move ahead. Their knowledge is not relevant to a struggling developing country, and their ways of knowing block out the local and indigenous ways of knowing that we need to develop.

Secondly, it presents the illusion that everyone in the world have access to high quality education. These courses will merely benefit the urban elites in our countries, who already embrace Western knowledge and ideas of progress, to the detriment of their own people who cannot afford clean water, let alone an internet connection. In order to develop our educational system so that it truly benefits our people, we must close the windows to the flood of Western educational materials that are attempted introduced through loans, or even as “free”, and concentrate on our own language and heritage.

Professor International Norms: The idea of freely and openly sharing educational resources is an emerging norm on the national and international arena. It’s an idea that traces its heritage back to the open source movement, and also to the very fundaments of science and the academia. It has been introduced by a number of norm entrepreneurs, such as MIT, the Hewlett Foundation, and individuals and groups that struggle to promote this norm, both in the US, and on the international arena.

They have had some success, with Open CourseWare projects started in many countries, for example Japan, Mexico, Korea, China, France and Holland, however the norm has still not reached the tipping point where it would lead to a norm cascade. Although a number of groups have signed on, no countries have as yet adopted open access to educational resources as a national norm, or something that they want to push in international fora. The creation of international networks often precedes this process, and an encouraging factor is that UNESCO has thoroughly endorsed this movement, and indeed were the ones who in 2002 coined the word “open educational resources”.

This movement has the potential to bring much benefit to the world, and contrary to what some previous speakers have alluded to, Open CourseWare is not an imperialist or capitalist ploy. The movement is very supportive of every country contributing and sharing of their valuable and unique material, and as mentioned, there is already OCW available from developing countries such as China, Vietnam and Mexico, which can be shared with the world. As one example, the Indian Institutes of Technology have put over thousand hours of video on Youtube.

In addition, because OCW utilizes an open license, the material can be remixed and adapted in many ways. Thus, the material can be translated to local languages, and edited to suit local conditions. (The same is of course true for Chinese and Japanese material – it can be translated to English, and used in American universities. Unfortunately, that does not seem to have happened yet). In this way, OCW indeed does constitute one global trend of sharing, but one that is equal, not a one-way transfer of knowledge and ideology from the West to the rest.

Professor Global Transformer: The only way we can achieve an equitable and sustainable world is to prioritize grassroots initiatives that treasure local knowledge and locally produced products, together with a radically inclusive democracy. Although the model of the elite MIT university is anachronistic, and not worthy of emulation, the fact that is the MIT OCW material is presented with an open license. This means that we can repurpose it and borrow from it when we design our community adult education intiatives, and online peer-to-peer learning communities. In that sense, this material is certainly useful.

I thank all the participants for their participation. Good night.

Stian

Zaid Ali Alsagoff, who has an intriguing Norwegian connection, has carved out a neat niche in the edublogger community, providing colorful and interesting slideshows on different topics, whether it be Web 2.0 educational tools, lists of edubloggers, or other resource collections. He has even published a book, called 69 learning adventures in 6 galaxies, available for free online.

A while back, he put out a slideshow with 25 27 edubloggers that he liked (and I was honored to be part of that list). In the comments, it was pointed out that all but two three were men, and some discussion ensued about why this was, whether this was important or not, etc. In a constructive spirit that I really admire, Zaid said: OK, fine, I will go find a bunch of great female bloggers, and post them here (paraphrased :)). And so he did:

Although I would certainly never choose not to read a good blog because it was written by a woman, when reflecting I realized that many of the blogs I read in the edublogger sphere were indeed written by men (while in the library blogosphere there seem to be a lot more women). This is also interesting since there are probably much more women who work in the education sector than men…. do they blog less, do they promote their blogs less, are their blogs qualitatively different from male blogs, do male bloggers link to them less frequently?

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but one tiny observation that I made when looking through the last slideshow, was the number of bloggers that had a URL under some blog hosting company (for example edublog.blogspot.com or miasteaching.wordpress.com – fictional examples), as opposed to their own hosted domain (miasteaching.org). I did a quick count, and from what I saw, in the first list (almost all male), 17 out of 25 had some kind of personal URL, whereas among the all-female list, only 4 (of which two were hosted at their company) had a personal URL.

No hard and fast conclusions to draw from that, this is obviously not a representative sample, but I wonder if it means anything… That the men are more focused on promoting themselves as a brand, whereas the women are more interested in communicating? Or the men are more interested in the technical challenges of hosting their own domain?

I am not trying to essentialize, but I wonder if there is some kind of a trend here. Just thinking.

anyway, kudos to Zaid, and my poor Google Reader who is now bursting in the seams

Stian

Image by Taekwonweirdo via Flickr

I am an international student in Canada, and although Canada is very welcoming to many permanent and temporary immigrants from around the world, there are many details to be navigated, much bureaucracy to be dealt with, and often hard to find good advice or guidance. The last few summers I have had one recurring problem that nobody could really give me good information about, and which was very stressful. Now that I have found some more information about this (the hard way), I decided to put it up here to share it with others in the same situation.

Leaving Canada while trying to extend your student permit
The problem I have had is that for various reasons I never got a student permit that covered the entire time I was studying in Canada, and so I had to keep renewing my student permit almost every year. This is annoying, since it costs about $150. The problem was that the registrar’s office at University of Toronto at Scarborough refused to issue a letter saying I was registered as a student in a given year, before I had actually chosen some courses – however course selection doesn’t open up until June. At that time, I was usually in some other country working or travelling.

As an aside, you definitively want to extend your student permit, as opposed to applying for a new one. Applying for a new one is done in your home country, needs more paperwork and documentation, more money, more waiting time, and potentially having to re-do the medical test, etc. On the other hand, as long as you apply before your permit runs out, you can apply to extend your permit, by sending it to Vegreville, Alberta (I actually looked it up on Google maps one time).

How long does this take? It varies – last year it took about a month, this year it took 40 days. However, the very neat secret is that as long as you apply for an extension before your student permit expires, you can keep studying until you get the answer – legally. This is clearly stated on the CIC webpage. What is not mentioned anywhere is what happens if you happen to leave the country in the middle of this, and have to re-enter.

What I used to do

My normal strategy to get around this was to prepare all the papers, fill out the forms and sign them etc, and then have my room mate or another friend send in the complete application once the final documents arrived. I would then hope that the permit arrived in time, have my room mate FedEx it to Norway, or wherever I was (sometimes I would have it sent to Buffalo, land there, pick it up, and take the bus across the border). This worked, although it was very often in the nip of time that I received the document.

Not this summer

This summer it took longer than usual because I was starting my masters. After my initial application, they issues me a conditional letter of acceptance, conditional upon my completion of my BA (reasonable demand). This meant that first UTSC had to process my graduation, which they did by mid June, then these documents had to be sent to OISE so that they could process them, and issue the final acceptance letter. This took for ever, and I actually ended up sending in the application the conditional acceptance letter + the graduation diploma (and this worked – although on my student permit it said: send in the full acceptance letter next time you are applying for an extension). The “no objections” final acceptance letter arrived in mid-July.

So my friend had submitted my application, and we were waiting. After a while, it became clear that I would not get an answer in time (there is a page on CIC when you can see the average wait times for different categories of applications). Clearly, skipping the crucial first weeks of class, where you choose your courses, meet your supervisor, attend orientation events etc, was not an option, so I was wondering what to do. I knew that in theory I should be allowed to study in Canada, since my friend had submitted the application in time (and I had the registered mail receipt to prove it), but I wasn’t very keen on arriving at the border without the actual document. I tried googling, reading everything I could on the CIC page, and even contacting the International Center as UofT (which gave me patently wrong information), but found nothing. Finally I just had to try.

At the border

After a gruelling 26 hours on the plane (and after embarassingly having missed a flight for the first time in my life the previous day), I arrived at Lester B. Pearson international airport in Toronto. I waited in line, and finally got to the booth. I showed my expired student permit, and explained that I had applied in time, I also showed my registered mail receipt and my acceptance letter. He wrote some letters on my form which means “you need to go to see the real immigration guys”.

I went into the other office and waited in line. When I got to the front, they were not surprised at all, but handled it very routinely. They tried to look-up my application in their system, but it hadn’t registered yet (since Vegreville hadn’t even gotten as far as opening the envelope – a month after they had received it). However, as a Norwegian I qualify for a tourist visa for six months, and they gave me this, saying that as long as I kept those documents with me I would have “implied status”, and it would be legal to study in Canada. When I got the student permit, I could just staple it to my passport, and I would be good – I didn’t have to leave and re-enter the country.

My second time at the border

I was of course extremely happy to be allowed in to Canada, since I was quite worried – I certainly didn’t want to be deported. However, not having the student permit was still a nuisance, since I couldn’t register to get a SIN card and get paid for my work as a graduate assistant, etc. As it happened, I had to leave Canada again before receiving the permit – I went to a conference in Utah. This time, upon coming back, the same thing happened (this time I was a bit more routined, and less stressed out). When they looked up my name, they said: Yes, you have gotten it, until July 30th. They then wrote July 30th in my passport, and sent me on my way. And when I got back to the apartment, the student permit was waiting for me.

Conclusions

First of all, I am not a lawyer or an immigration advisor – this is just my own experience. Yours might be different, and these rules and regulations might also change without warning.

If you apply for a student permit before your current one runs out, you can stay in Canada and study until you receive a reply. If you leave the country in the meantime, and you are eligible for a tourist visa, you can re-enter the country without any problems. It would be useful if you had an original copy of the registered mail receipt (I only had a copy), a copy of the application you sent in (I didn’t have it, but they asked for one), as well as your admittance letter (I did have this). Note that if you are from a country that requires a visa even for tourists, such as China, this would probably work differently!

Another tentative conclusion is that since they can at any time access my immigration records on their computer, I might not have to have the student permit fedex’ed to me in the future – as long as it has been issues, they will be able to admit me as a student (this should apply to people who need student permits as well).

Note as I wrote above that you will still need your student permit for applying for a SIN card, and often your school’s registrar will pester you for a copy etc. If at all possible, send in the application as early as possible.

I hope this is useful to the small group of people it touches, because this information would have made my life a lot easier if I had known it a few months or years ago. Feel free to repost or link to it from places where people concerned may come across it.

Stian

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I just attended the second day of the Open Courseware Consortium conference in Logan, UT (the first day was for board members only), and thought I’d report on some of the things that caught my attention, and also comment on my own thoughts. There was lot’s of other things that I didn’t cover, much of it can be found in the wiki.

Plenary session
Lot’s of organization nitty-gritty, new staff, etc. OCWC now independent of MIT, next Open Education conference will be at University of British Columbia, probably aiming for one major international conference a year, and one smaller topical/regional conference. Thinking about enabling individual membership in the organization, corporate members. A special discipline focus on health – possibly other discipline projects later. An upcoming toolkit (or toolshed) with information about software products, ways of “selling OCW” to an institution, best practices in copyright clearance etc.

Connexions arranging an open education conference in Houston in February 2009 and I think Tecnologico de Monterey arranging one in April 2009.

The Open University of the Netherlands: funding for OCW ends in summer ‘08, but they decided to continue. Dutch high school students have many “free hours”, and schools are eager for them to try out university courses. High schools pay for training teachers to use the material, and for giving exams that provide accreditation of the learning.

MIT has developed a portal for high school students, which presents the material most likely to be useful to them – they are considering other similar portals in the future, perhaps one for example on energy and the environment. (Wouldn’t it be great if people were able to interract with MIT’s site, remixing content, creating lenses or their own portals?)

They also syndicate their content through for example iTunes University and their YouTube channel. An interesting new initiative to make content more accessible is to provide closed captioning on YouTube videos – like this one (while this is awesome, why not upload it to dotSub, which allows you to downlod videos with subtitles, and allow collaborative subtitling online – so that groups like Universia and CORE could contribute translated subtitles?). They’ve been working with 3playmedia, who I think will present later this week, on developing the transcription system.

Finally, MIT was proud of their publisher agreements with for example Elsevier, which enables MIT to publish select material from Elsevier journals as part of MIT courses, with Creative Commons licenses.

Universia gave a curious presentation. They talked about the fact that they had translated metadata for OCW courses into ten languages, and also normalized the tags used to tag lectures or courses, so that they were consistent accross languages and courses. The main reason for this seemed to be search-engine optimization (SEO) for OCW, and they proudly showed off the statistics showing the numbers of hits increasing – noting for example that the first Google hit on a particular search in Arabic was a course in Universia. But if the user clicks through, she finds out that all the material is still in Spanish… Is this particularly helpful to an Arabic user? We obviously want to increase the visibility and findability of our offerings, but by translating huge amounts of metadata before translating the courses, one runs the risk of being accused of spamming search engines, and annoying people instead of helping them.

Japanese OCW is interesting, in that they currently have 21 university members, 5 non-profit organizations and 11 companies. I would like to know more about the role of the company members, whether they are using the OCW internally (and paying to get around the non-commercial license?), or even producing their own OCW? (So far, these companies are not listed on JOCW’s homepage either, which is quite unhelpful, since it doesn’t even link to the different courses. They are supposed to have 806 Japanese courses and 172 in English, but do I have to click on each institution’s page to find these English courses?)

Johns Hopkins School of Public Health has developed a very interesting image library of medical images and graphs that can be used in OCW, much of them harvested from already existing OCWs. It’s nice if material inside an OCW – pictures, sound files, illustrations, texts – are made easily available for remix and reuse outside of the whole package, and this is a good example of that.

OpenUniversity UK is distributing their content in many innovative ways. Because it is all stored as XML, they can automatically generate a wide variety of formats. In addition, they make DVDs which are used by prisoners (OpenUniversity has 1,500 students who are imprisoned). They are also thinking about making their content available within a hospital setting. Very innovative.

Stian

Photo credits: srharris, joiseyshowaa & jpellgen

During my undergraduate degree in International Development Studies, we had to spend a year working in a developing country, and develop a thesis based on primary research conducted in that country. I spent my year working in Jakarta (for CARE). While there, I came across the phenomenon of community-run libraries, which was extremely widespread and fascinating. While trying to understand the phenomenon better, I realized that there was extremely little research available on this, and I decided to try to both map the movement and its history, and also try to investigate what kind of factors would have led or enabled this movement to happen in Indonesia, at a certain place and a certain time in history.

Children reading at the Taman Bacaan in Arjasari

I early made a committment to making my research available both as open access, and in a fully translated version in Indonesian as well. I really want my research to be available to everyone in Indonesia, both activists and academics, both to make a contribution to the scholarly discourse in Indonesia, but also to be able to receive much more feedback about the possible mistakes that I have made, so that my subsequent writings on this topic can be better informed. Getting it translated was a long and slightly painful journey, and I might write about this later, but I finally have a version that I am more or less happy with. Although the thesis has been available at T-SPACE since April, I have held back on sharing it with most of the people that assisted me, because I wanted the Indonesian version to be available for distribution.

I am contributing both language versions to E-LIS, but their approval is taking too long, so I am also publishing the files here on my blog.

English abstract:

Since 2001, a movement of individuals, neighbourhood and community organizations and NGOs starting and running their own libraries has emerged in Indonesia. Called Taman Bacaans (TBs) – reading gardens – these simple libraries, often hosted in somebody’s house, or in a community building, provide easy and informal access to books, as well as frequent literacy programming. This thesis traces the historical heritage of these TBs back to the early renting libraries of peranakan Chinese in the 19th century, through Balai Pustaka and the public library movement under Sukarno. The modern TB emerges in the 1980s, the government attempts a wide-scale implementation of TBs in the 1990s, and a community movement finally emerges in 2001.
Using interviews with informants and newspaper articles, blogs, mailing lists, and NGO and government reports, I describe the process of how the TB movement emerges in Bandung and Yogyakarta. I also identify a number of factors that enabled and supported the movement: inspiring individual role-models, “best-case” libraries, networks and the roles of Islam and nationalism. Finally I provide an overview of the situation today, combining government statistics with the results of a survey conducted in Jakarta, and show that there are three kinds of TBs: those set-up by national, regional or local government (TBMs), those funded by large-scale donors, and independent TBs grounded in the local communities. I conclude with a number of recommendations for government and donors.

Indonesian abstract:

Sejak tahun 2001, di Indonesia telah ada suatu pergerakan dari kalangan individu, tingkat rukun tetangga (RT) dan organisasi kemasyarakatan serta LSM yang memulai dan menjalankan perpustakaan mereka. Perpustakaan-perpustakaan sederhana ini dikenal sebagai Taman Bacaan (TB). Lokasi mereka sering di rumah seseorang atau di dalam sebuah bangunan umum, dan menyediakan akses yang mudah dan bersifat informal untuk  buku-buku dan banyak kegiatan-kegiatan literasi. Tesis ini menelusuri kembali sejarah tentang TB mulai dari masa persewaan buku oleh keturunan Cina di abad 19, melalui Balai Pustaka dan pergerakan perpustakaan umum di masa pemerintahan Sukarno. TB modern mulai muncul di tahun 1980, lalu pemerintah mencoba menerapkan TB berskala besar di tahun 1990, dan pada akhirnya pergerakan masyarakat muncul di tahun 2001.
Berdasarkan wawancara dengan para sumber informasi, artikel-artikel di surat kabar, blog dan milis serta laporan NGO dan pemerintah, saya memaparkan proses munculnya pergerakan TB di Bandung dan Yogyakarta. Saya juga menunjukkan sejumlah faktor-faktor yang dapat dan mendukung pergerakan tersebut, yaitu: inspirasi tokoh teladan, “perpustakaan kasus terbaik”, jaringan-jaringan serta peran Islam dan nasionalisme. Di bagian akhir saya memberikan ihktisar mengenai situasi hari ini, yang menggabungkan statistik pemerintah dengan hasil survei yang dilakukan di Jakarta, yang menunjukkan ada tiga jenis TB, yaitu: TB yang dibentuk oleh pemerintah nasional, regional dan daerah, TB yang didanai oleh donor berskala-besar, dan TB independen yang didirikan oleh masyarakat setempat. Saya juga melampirkan beberapa rekomendasi bagi pemerintah dan para penyumbang.

Files: English thesis and the Indonesian translation (without illustrations to reduce filesize)

Both are under Creative Commons BY license. I am eager that as many people as possible that would be interested in this topic are able to come across it, so feel free to share it with others that are interested. I am also very happy to receive feedback and other perspectives, whether in comments or by email (shaklev at gmail dot com).

Stian

Since I kind of “began” my journey in open education through David Wiley’s course, attending COSL’s Open Education Conference 2008 in Utah is almost like coming full circle for me. Since I also think it’s extremely important to get more students involved in this movement, and conversation, I was very excited to see that the Hewlett Foundation had provided for four student scholarships, to be determined by an essay. And now I have just been told that I am one of the winners, which is a real honor. After spending my own money attending the conference in Dalian, and iCommons last year, it feels like a wonderful recognition. I was encouraged by a friend to post my essay online, so here is what I submitted. I am hoping to see a lot of you in Logan, and I am also excited to meet the three others that won the scholarships.

—

A few days ago, I was visiting the university library of the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in Varanasi, India, one of the most well known universities in India. Although it is housed in a grand building, I was struck by the extremely bad condition of the books, and the almost complete lack of any recent literature. In the section on libraries, the most recent book was from 1980, and books about library automatization from 1965 were prominently displayed. While seeing this, I tried to imagine studying or conducting research in such an atmosphere.

The various open movements carry the promise of broadening access to learning and research to much larger parts of the world, and to enable the students at BHU not only to receive a top-class education, but also later to conduct cutting-edge research, and to share their research with the rest of the world. Open access to research is crucially important for researchers, but also for students. Open educational resources introduce students to a field, and at higher levels, provide the contextual and pedagogical glue between pieces of research. New models of open and collaborative learning and teaching, such as the “Wiley wikis”, provide models of the process through which open learning can happen.

Although a participant in the North-American and worldwide English-speaking community of educators and thinkers, I come to the field with a number of perspectives. My mother tongue is Norwegian, spoken by only five million people, and this, together with my childhood experiences with Esperanto, incalculated in me an understanding of inequality in linguistic issues, and a deep passion for supporting national and regional languages. My educational background is in development studies, and spending more than 1,5 years in China, 1 year in Indonesia and several months each in Mexico, Russia and India, as well as speaking fluently eight languages has allowed me begin to see things from a multitude of national and cultural perspectives.

Having a background as a technology tinkerer, I am fascinated by the different new platforms offered for online teaching and learning. Having been active in political and social groups, I am extremely curious about ways of online cooperation and equitable governance that we can develop (especially across language barriers). I am also participating in a long-ranging conversation about “the future of the university”, or the peer2peer university – which includes thinking about factors that support informal learning, as well as accreditation, and rethinking the structure of “courses” or “degrees”. I got involved in this conversation at iCommons in 2007, and it resurfaced at the Open Learning conference in Dalian, and will be discussed both at the iCommons 2008 and the Open Education conference in Utah (if our proposal is accepted).

Two of the most interesting research (and advocacy) topics for me are how open educational resources are being used – whether by self-learners, or by educators who adapt them, as well as the issue of translation and cultural adaptation. I bring these two topics together in my MA thesis proposal, where I plan to do a qualitative study of the adaptation and use of MIT OCW materials in Chinese university courses. China is perhaps the country after the USA that has most aggressively both adapted foreign OCW, and began producing their own (Chinese Quality OCW, CQOCW), supported by organizations like CORE. Statistics show that several hundred Chinese courses are currently based partially on translated MIT OCW materials, but we know very little about what part of the material they use, how they adapt it, and what the pedagogical and non-pedagogical outcomes of this is.

Participating in the Dalian Open Learning conference was a wonderful experience for me, meeting many of the people active in the open learning community in person. At the same time, it made me sad to see the great divide between the Chinese researchers (almost 50% of the participants), and the rest. Both because of linguistic and cultural differences, there was sadly far too little exchange and mutual learning going on – and the non-Chinese participants probably lost out the most.

The different open movements are ideally leading to a “flatter” world, which can highlight the best quality material no matter where in the world it is produced. Yet so far, the spread of materials has been very one-sided, with material being produced in the US and translated into other languages. The Indian IIT’s, which some say are on par with or better than MIT, have began publishing lectures on Youtube, and English-speaking students can now choose if they want physics explained by an MIT professor, or one from IIT. But I have yet to hear a single US university or organization announce that they will begin translating Chinese courses (of which there are over a thousand available online currently) into English.

I expect to learn a huge amount from the conference, and come home with my mind swirling with new ideas. I hope to make new connections – people from around the world with whom I can collaborate and learn from long after the conference has ended. Hopefully I will hear about great intiatives that I can emulate through the Open & Free @ University of Toronto network, which I will try to revitalize this fall. But I also hope to be injecting my own perspectives into the debates – perspectives of multilingualism, of developing countries, of end-users, and of undergraduate students – having just graduated from an undergraduate degree myself. And of course, I will spread what I learn – through my blog (syndicated at oerblogs.org), lectures and activities at the University of Toronto School of Education, and in other ways.

Thank you for considering my application.
Stian Haklev

I was lucky enough to be invited to give a talk at Indian Institute of Public Administration in New Delhi, a research institute that does consulting jobs for the Indian government and also training of senior civil servants. I spoke to a group of perhaps 25 librarians and professors, trying to give a “whirlwind” tour of the field of open research and open learning, both in general but also in terms of its usefulness for developing countries. It seemed to be well received, and I had several requests afterward for more information. I recorded the lecture on Audacity on my MacBook (quality is mostly good, except for a few times when I turn away from my laptop), and synched it with the slides on SlideShare (synch is mostly good except when the slides change too fast, and SlideShare can’t keep up).

Feel free to have a look and let me know what you think. Below I have also included all the links from the presentation, mainly for the benefit of those who attended.

Thanks again to IIPA and Dr. Munshi for inviting me.

Correction: Hindawi is based in Egypt, not in India. Apologies for this. However, there is still a lot of open access journals being published in India.

Update: Here is a direct link to the MP3 recording (if you press play below, it will play the sound and sync the slides, but if you have a slow connection, or want to listen offline).

Links:

• OpenLibrary
• Universal Library
• E-LIS (repository of library and information science papers)
• PlOS Biology (high-profile open access journal in biology)
• Hindawi (Indian publisher with over 100 open access journals, and interesting business model)
• UsefulChem (example of Open Notebook Science – lab notebook from a chemistry lab)
• DomainEvolution (another example of Open Notebook Science – this one experimenting with hosting it at Google Code)
• iLabs (MIT project to enable remote controlling of labs, to give access to laboratory for students in other countries)
• Newspaper article about iLabs (African students get access to MIT labs – could also be expanded to researchers – demonstrates overlap between university education and research)
• MIT OpenCourseWare (the pioneer in the OCW field, 1800 courses available)
• MIT Introduction to Numerical Simulation (example of an OCW course page)
• Universia (translates MIT OCW material into Spanish)
• CORE (China Open Resources for Education – manages translation of MIT OCW courses into Chinese)
• OpenLearn (Open University UK’s OCW section)
• Connexions (enables peer2peer construction of course material, and quality control happens through “lenses”)
• Open Learning Initiative (CMU courses that are interactive and provide feedback to students)
• Intro to Open Ed (the first “Wiley wiki” course, which I also participated in)
• Week 1 (my first submission in the Intro to Open Ed course)
• A number of courses based on the “Wiley wiki” model introduced by Intro to Open Ed:
  Facilitating online communities
  Evaluation of e-learning for best practices
  Designing for flexible learning practice
  Connectivism and Connective Knowledge
  Translation of Connectivism course into Portuguese
  Translation of Connectivism course into Spanish
• IIT Courses on Youtube
• List of Chinese OCW courses at CORE
• Confucianism in France in the 18th Century (Example of Chinese OCW that should be subtitled in French)
• China Geography (Chinese OCW that has been translated to English)

Background

I somehow came across the homepage of Sarai about two years ago, while living in Indonesia. I was extremely impressed with what I saw from their webpages and mailing lists – a vibrant community space/collective that was interested in many of the same things as me; urban issues in developing countries, open source, open culture, national and regional languages etc. They publish a ton of great writings, both in English and Hindi, mostly available from their website, and I downloaded several Sarai Readers and enjoyed reading their thoughts on urban development in Delhi, piracy culture, etc.

I also subscribed to their newsletter, and every month I would get an email telling my about the films they were showing and the talks they were featuring, thinking it was such a pity that all this interesting stuff was going on in Delhi, and I was stuck in Toronto… So when I was finally going to India this summer, for the first time, I knew I wanted to fit in a visit to Delhi, and to Sarai.

On Friday, having spent two days in Delhi being exhausted from avoiding all the touts in Connaught Place, and walking around in the humidity, I suddenly received an invitation from Sarai to a seminar where all their Open Source Fellows would be presenting their projects. Sarai has been using some of their own money, and also some money from Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, to give fellowships for projects involving open source and localization into Indian languages to groups around India. I was extremely lucky to be able to attend this very interesting gathering, and I learnt a lot from the people there. Here are some of the projects that were presented.

Introduction

Gora Mohanty introduced Sarai’s involvement in FLOSS. Originally the organization mainly focused on urban studies, but they needed tools to publish in Indian languages, and originally their involvement was more to “scratch an itch”. They currently have 40 open fellowships, and 10 specific FLOSS fellowships. Based on the experiences from this year, they will try to provide more support to the fellows, and also promote more interaction between the different fellows, in future years. A question related to this is what collaboration technology to be used, since for example IRC is very convenient for some, but scares others away. (At the end of day one, I suggested having all the fellows blog, and then aggregating all the blogs in a planet somewhere). One experience they have gained is that technical people are often not the best people to do localization work.

In general, the projects have had a very high success rate, partly explained by the fact that the people who receive the fellowships are often older and more established than for example the Google Summer of Code participants, and have a track record of delivering.

Lately it has become much easier to get funding for doing FLOSS projects in India, since the concept is becoming quite widely known, although perhaps not so well understood by funding agencies still. There is also more and more commercial activity in for example Hindi localization, and many of the projects Sarai fund are more on the “edges”, involving lesser spoken languages, etc.

An example was given of a workshop in Kashmir University, where 100 students showed up. Gora usually starts his presentations by asking how many have used computers before, and then goes on to ask how many have used Windows, etc. However, in this crowd only two people had ever used computers at all before. Yet they came to the meeting and were eager to get involved!

KDE 4.2 localization

R. Shrivastava has been working on localization of KDE 4.2. He also showed off how the KDE applications work well running natively in Windows. We discussed a bit how to come up with good terminology in Hindi, since there is a balance between simply taking all the English words and spelling them in Devanagari (which is what most cell phone ads in India seem to do), and on the other extreme use obscure terms for downloading or computer that some government agency has come up with, but which are very foreign to the users. He explained that they had tried to strike a balance, using a language that felt natural.

We also discussed what kind of tools could be used, especially to access translation memories from other projects, and other languages. Many of the Northern Indian languages are very similar, such as Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Marathi, Bhojpuri and Nepali (although with some exceptions written in different scripts). If one is doing a Hindi translation and is stuck on a term, it might thus be useful to be able to quickly look up how they translated it in Punjabi, etc. I am not sure if KBabel for example has this functionality today – it would be useful for other language groups as well, such as Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, or Finnish and Estonian.

Publishing in Indian languages using TeX

Dr. C. S. Yogananda is a professor of mathematics, and has often helped arrange the math olympics. TeX is a publishing package that separates content from display, and is especially often used in the sciences and math, because it has powerful capabilities to display mathematical formulas, etc.

He described how earlier versions of TeX available for Indian languages required a pre-processor, but that he had developed a version that did not, and was thus much easier to use. He has already developed a version in Kannada, and believes that a one week workshop with participants from different language groups would be enough to produce TeX packages for all the Indian languages using the same framework.

He also discussed localization, and his own belief that mere translation was not enough. He took as example GCompris, a package of games for children, and talked about how localization implied changing some games that Indian kids were not familiar with, updating pictures to reflect Indian realities, changing maps so that they were more relevant, etc.

He also talked about early Indian typewriters, stating that if they had been designed from scratch only inspired by the Western models, instead of taking Western models and keeping the same amount of keys, etc, just exchanging for Indic language letters, people might have been much more comfortable typing in Indic languages. (He gave an example from a Supreme Court judge who told that previous to the typewriter, all court deliberations had been in Kannada, but after the advent of the typewriter, it had been so difficult to type in Kannada, that they had switched to English). Even today there are apparently some issues in the Unicode space for Kannada which also makes Kannada computing difficult.

They have been working on Kannada OCR, which is currently 95% finished. Instead of using an existing framework, they started from scratch. Hopefully this will be finished in another 6 months. Finally he showed examples of a Kannada-English dictionary that had been produced using their system, with thousands of pages, and all the indexing etc, using the advanced functionality in TeX. As far as I understood, this dictionary will later be released openly on the web, after a two year exclusivity agreement with a publishing company has lapsed.

One thing that I found peculiar is that the entire input in the TeX source files (which are later processed and turned into PDFs or other output formats) is written not using a Kannada font, but in latin letters – “transcribed”. He insisted that the system for input was logical, and that they were able to input at high speed using this system, but I thought to myself, what if India had invented the computer, and somebody had forced me to input my latest Norwegian poetry, or novel, using Norwegian transcribed into Devanagari alphabet? This concept is still strange to me.

Oriya lexicon

Dr. N. M. Pattnaik started out with a fascinating history of dictionaries in Oriya. The first dictionary dates back to the 17th Century, and was written for poets. As such, the words were alphabetized based on the last letters, not the first (to improve rhyming), and the meanings of each word were given in a poem. In the 18th Century, missionaries started producing dictionaries and grammars to aid them in their work, but these dictionaries were organized subject wise. In 1916 the first etymological dictionary in Oriya appeared. Then, between 1930 and 1940 a gigantic dictionary of 7 volumes and 10,000 pages was produced. This dictionary contained 185,000 head words, with translations in English, Hindi and Bengali. Unfortunately, only 200 copies were sold, and most of the other copies were destroyed due to rights disputes with the publisher and the heir.

This amazing dictionary, which is of course an incredibly important part of the linguistic and cultural history, not just of Orissa, but all of India, has been scanned and made available through Pattnaik’s organization. They did it using very simple equipment – a digital camera on a wooden stand, and a huge amount of manual editing and post-processing. The resulting 600 MBs have not yet been put on the internet, but I received a copy, and I will post it to archive.org as soon as I am back in Canada in a few weeks (with good broadband). Sneakernet across the world.

This dictionary represented the peak of Oriya dictionary making, and in the small dictionaries published today, one cannot even find modern words like nuclear or electron. There were also glossaries produced by government committees, but these consisted of scientists that never used Oriya in their own work, and were often were unnatural. In addition, the committees were based on subject field, so a given word, used in many subjects, might be translated differently in every committee.

His organization mainly works on making science fun for kids, and believes that this has to be done in their own language. However, scientists are often not very good in local languages (since most of their education and work happens in English), and so they need good lists of scientific terminology in Oriya and English.

Dr. Pattnaik’s organization generated a database of 20,000 Oriya-Oriya popular words, through the help of science writers who have long experience in popularizing technology and science in the Oriya language. They also produced an English-Oriya dictionary which currently has 6,000 words, and they hope it will reach 15,000 words soon. They will also add explanations in Oriya of terms, and reverse the database to generate an Oriya-English database as well. All this is available in StarDict format, which means that it can be easily used in applications for Mac, Linux, and Windows. As well, they have contributed word lists to aspell, to improve spell-checking for Oriya on Linux.

Assamese localization of GNOME

This was presented by Gora, since the fellow A. Phukan could not be present. Phukan works with RedHat, which has been doing a lot of localization work, and lately working on an interface for submitting translations through the web (similar to LaunchPad, but perhaps more open source).

Assamese is closely related to Bengali and Oriya, and is spoken in Assam. C-DAC has already done valuable work localizing software, however they don’t work closely with the community, and thus use too formal words that are unnatural to users, and when they are done, just hand off the results and leaves – whereas software localization is something that has to happen continually in a process.

In addition to localization work, Phukan has also created an online dictionary of Assamese, based on user contributions.

Marathi and Urdu User Guide to Open Office

This was also presented by Gora. Sarvangin Vikas Sansthan use “reversed rewards” to get localization done. They post a number of possible jobs they can do on their website, together with an extremely reasonable price, and they wait for people to fund them. In this project, they translated the 380+ page user guide to OpenOffice into Marathi and Urdu. One thing I noticed from the screenshots was that they were based on non-localized versions of OO.org (ie. with English menus, etc).

The organization also does a lot of training in OpenOffice an other OSS software in schools in Maharashtra.

I will write about day 2 in a separate post.

Stian

I recently left Varanasi for New Delhi, and I am staying in the crazy and dirty backpacker ghetto called Pahar Ganj, conveniently located behind the main train station. Luckily, my hotel has a TV (with some 80 channels), and thus I was able to catch the live broadcast of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. I am usually not a huge olympics, or sports fan, but given my long connection to China, and how much I have been hearing about the olympics from my Chinese friends – ever since I was there first in 2001 – I was quite interested in how it would turn out.

In addition, watching it on Indian TV gave me an opportunity to listen to the Indian commentators and see how the olympics, and China, were perceived here. In fact, I kept switching back and forth between three different English language channels (all Indian) – one was CNN IBN, one was Time Now I think, and there was a third on, perhaps NDTV.

Prelude

In the run up to the Olympics, much of the newspaper coverage has been focused on the fact that India’s contingent is quite small, and that India cannot be expected to win many medals. In fact, I think they have only won 16 golds in all the Olympics together. There was also a row about who would get to accompany the athletes, with some having their parents going with them, and others not even getting a space for their coach (reminded me a bit of the negotiations in Chak De).

One of those “can only happen in India” moments was when the weightlifter Monika Devi was expelled for testing positive on a dope test. Manipur is a province tucked away near Cambodia, with a people that looks more East-Asian than South-Asian, and they decided that this had all been some kind of conspiracy from “mainland India” to exclude Manipur from the Olympics. Subsequently a bandh – general strike – was declared for 24 hours in the entire province, effigies were burnt, demonstrations ensued in which at least five people were hurt, etc. In the end Monika was cleared to go, but this was too late to have her enter the competition (I suppose the fact that she was subsequently cleared only deepens the Manipuri belief in a grand conspiracy).

In general, Indians seem far too eager to block railway lines, call for general strikes, and burn effigies. Another example from the last few days was when Kannada groups blocked all the railway lines going to Tamil Nadu. The reason was that Kannada and Telugu were about to be awarded “classical language” status by the Indian government (which would mean more support for language preservation and development). Apparently the Kannada groups believed that Tamil Nadu (which posits itself as home of the original classical Dravidian language) was trying to block this appointment, and thus shut down traffic. But back to the Olympics…

Extremely positive

Generally, the commentators were extremely positive to the opening ceremony. Especially one of the commentators, I think on Time Now, was a talking machine. He seemed to be trying to break some kind of record, as he gushed out superlatives, the mother of all ceremonies, amazing, spectacular, cannot believe my own eyes… All the channels also spent a lot of energy on the Indian team when they entered, re-running for 20 minutes the one minute footage of the ragtag team entering, and Sonia Gandhi waving to them. The focus, however, was quite different. Our exuberant commentator was over himself in appreciation, talking about how excited the Indian’s looked, the patriotism that formerly beamed out of their eyes, and the smile on Sonia Gandhi’s lips that had not been seen for so long.

The other channel, I believe CNN IBN, was however horrified by the fact that while the men had been wearing nice traditional Indian garb, only one of the women wore a sari, while the others wore training jackets and pants. In addition, about half the Indian team had digital cameras and were busy filming the audience while walking out, prompting some comments that they looked like a bunch of tourists (in all fairness, most of the other delegations did the same thing).

This “dress disaster” prompted much discussion, and in the newspaper it was later revealed that the girls had come straight from practice and not had time to change (one wonders if they hadn’t been told about the Opening Ceremony). However, evil tongues suggest that the saris were not delivered in time, or that the athletes were unhappy about the color and quality of the fabric. We shall never know.

Could India do it?

One of the topics raised frequently by all the commentators, who were awed by the organization and infrastructure in Beijing, was “could India host the Olympics?”. Many frankly said no, stating that India couldn’t put on a tenth of this Opening Ceremony, and discussing the infrastructure in Delhi as extremely poor. However, the country will host the Commonwealth Games in 2010, and this was seen as an important stepping stone. Apparently about 50 officials from India were in Beijing trying to learn from the organization of the games.

Stian

Thanks to ..· ✈Katherina ➳·.. for the two first pictures.