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 [...]
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 [...]
I am playing around with my old scripts for repacking Wikipedia for offline access, and ran it on the Norwegian database to see if they were still working. I realized that they had changed the way they saved filenames on the disk, which broke my program. I thought I’d post the solution (which took me [...]
It happened two of the three times that I crossed the Niagara/Buffalo border last year, so it cannot be such a rare occurrence. The first time I met him in the line at Toronto Bus Terminal, and elderly Chinese guy. I chatted with him in Chinese, and he told me he’d lived in Canada for [...]
