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 […]

There is of course no doubt that what America needs most of all is neither Clinton, nor Obama, but Amitabh Singh Bachchan (somehow I managed to get his name wrong the first time around) for president. I don’t think I will ever really understand the racial relationship in the US between blacks and whites, but […]

I have written about the plan to buy the copyright for textbooks in Indonesia and publish the books online (here, and here). Today I found out, through the excellent Indian book blog Scholars Without Borders that the Indian National Council on Educational Research and Training (NCERT) offers free downloadable versions of many Indian K-12 text […]

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 […]

3.
In the morning I cast my net into the sea.
I dragged up from the dark abyss things of strange aspect and strange beauty - some shone like a smile, and some glistened like tears, and some were flushed like the cheeks of a bride.
When with the day’s burden I went home, my love was sitting […]

2.
‘Ah, Poet, the evening draws near; your hair is turning gray.
‘Do you in your lonely musing hear the message of the hereafter?’
‘It is evening,’ the poet said, ‘and I am listening because some one may call from the village, late though it be.
‘I watch if young straying hearts meet together, and two pairs of eager […]

I’ve always loved dictionaries, and especially the mouse-over ones - I did a brief screencast of Wenlin, and hacked up my own little Indonesian dictionary when learning Indonesian. Currently I am learning Hindi, so of course I had to go out and investigate the tools available. Turns out that there’s not that much. Shabdkosh is […]

by Rabindranath Tagore
An idle, useless fellow he could never keep a job. But of his whims and fancies there was no end.
For instance, in small little wooden frames he would make lovely shell-patterns which, from a distance, looked like some ill-assorted painting: here a flight of birds; or a rough, uneven landscape, with cows grazing […]

I randomly picked up this book by Martha Nussbaum at the Munk Center library the other night. I remember reading about both the Godhra train carnage, the controversy over the Ayodhya temple and the anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat, I think mainly through the Economist.
I am glad that I did, because it was an incredibly captivating […]