Caveat
I have spent over one and a half year of my life living in China, and a significantly larger part visiting it, learning the language, watching movies and soap-operas, reading blogs, discussing it with Chinese and non-Chinese, and in general thinking about it. There is still so much I don’t know or understand, but it […]
Just a quick update on my plans for the summer. I am leaving on Monday for Beijing and Dalian, to participate in the OpenCourseWare Consortium conference on Open Educational Resources, organized by CORE and Dalian Technical University. Then I will visit some old friends and ex-students from the time I taught in China, and spend […]
The idea of OpenCourseWare in its current incarnation started with MIT (note that the Wikipedia page I linked to talks as if MIT are the only ones in the world who do OCW - I should update it, but I won’t manage tonight, unless someone beats me to it). They received funding from the Hewlett […]
This mp3 provides much better quality sound, but below you can see the live performance. The lyrics are the same.
sore tugu pancoran
pillar at night at Pancoran (famous area in Jakarta)
si budi kecil kuyub menggigil
the very little guy shivers
menahan dingin tanpa jas hujan
trying to stand the cold without a rain jacket
di simpang jalan tugu pancoran
on the […]
In February, I translated a news report about the Indonesian government planning to buy the Copyright for Indonesian text books, and let libraries distribute them freely. At that time I made a plea for these books to be also released as Creative Commons on the web. Since then three more articles have been published on […]
Perjalanan ini
This travel
Terasa sangat menyedihkan
Feels very sad
Sayang engkau tak duduk
Too bad you are not sitting
Di samping ku kawan
Next to me, friend
Banyak Cerita
Many stories
Yang mestinya kau saksikan
Which you have surely witnessed
Di tanah kering bebatuan
On the dry stone-filled earth
Oh… Oh… Oh…
Tubuhku terguncang
My body gets shaken
Di hempas batu jalanan
By the stony road
Hati tergetar menatap
The heart is shaking […]
One of the problems I had when learning Indonesian in Jakarta was that what people actually spoke seemed to be very distinct from what was in my textbooks (never mind that my textbooks were also about 20 years old, but most importantly they taught a very refined Indonesian. I remember on the title page was […]
Although it was Eurocentric, I like to think back at the time when all serious scholars in Europe were expected to know at least French (and by association perhaps Italian and Spanish), German, English and some Greek and Latin. When you read a book, and there are frequent citations in those languages, that are not […]
My problem with doing research is that I come across so many interesting topics, and it is hard not to pursue them, and get lost. Sometimes I write books down in my “books to read” list, or download pdfs meaning to read them later. Sometimes I spend hours on things that I absolutely do not […]
From the excellent [i:boekoe] blog on book culture in Indonesia, comes a press release about the Indonesian government. I have translated it below (slightly shortened):
The Indonesian government buys the copyright to textbooks
(From the newspaper Kompas, February 8, 2008)
The Indonesian government has decided to buy the copyright of textbooks for primary, secondary and high school. […]
