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 have mentioned my Wikipedia Offline project before (here and here), not to mention it its previous, very different, incarnation. The project is 95% functional, but is still waiting for assistance for someone who is better at Ruby or Python than me. Today I wrote up a number of bullet points, and posted a brief […]
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 […]
Google Books vs OCA
We’ve heard a lot about Google Books, whether it’s Google’s grand plans or them getting sued by publishers, as well as various complaints about quality control (see this First Monday article). There have also been discussions about the terms of use (many books that are clearly in the public domain show up […]
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 […]
This is something I have really been waiting for! PhotoDropper is a plugin for WordPress that enables you to seemlessly search for CC licensed pictures in Flickr and other databases, and with a click insert the picture into your blog, complete with the photo credit. I have always found it a pain to have to […]
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 […]
Sometimes the world seems to be going in the right direction. The sun outside is beautiful, even in the cold Toronto weather, and I just found out that Obama won all three primaries along the Potomac, and the Harvard faculty voted yay to institute the first faculty-initiated open access mandate.
Stian
I know that I am egregiously late with this assignment, and I apologize for that. In addition to some major events in my personal life, two important things have happened that are quite related to this course. The first is that I finally submitted my application for an MA in theory and policy studies at […]
