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 […]
One incredibly progressive feature of the American constitution, is that it provides that everything produced by the government immediately enters public domain. I think this makes complete sense, and there is a slow movement among other countries to follow up, but it is something that should have happened a long time ago. Due to this […]
I’ve posted some great Amharic dance videos earlier, and today I came across Ethiotube.net, a Youtube clone started in February this year and describe themselves in this way:
Founded in February 2007, EthioTube is the leader in Ethiopian online video, and the premier destination to watch and share original videos related to Ethiopia worldwide through a […]
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 […]
I love Wikipedia (despite the occasional problems, unreasonableness, problems of governance and growing pains). One of the reasons I’ve always enjoyed contributing is that you are guaranteed an audience. Writing on this blog, for example, I never really know if anyone is reading. I can see my website statistics, but they are notoriously fickle - […]
It’s hard to take any anthropology courses without hearing about research ethics from professors eager to deal with anthropology’s colonial past, and before we went on our field works we also discussed quite a bit about research ethics. There are many aspects to this field, however many face the issue because they need to get […]
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 […]
This is a hand-out that a friend and I put together for a retreat this weekend together with students that will go on one year placements abroad. I wanted to emphasize the importance of learning languages, and give ideas about methods and resources.
Handout on learning languages / bahasa-bahasa / 语言 / भाशाएं / языкoв
Learning a […]
