gdp's Comments

Random Stuff that Matters : Indonesian government wants to buy text book copyrights

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 23:41:36 +0000

I haven\\\'t heard much about this, but I haven\\\'t been spending too much time in the Indonesian blogosphere lately. These books were never meant to be licensed under CC licenses (I wish they had, of course). They would have had to use non-commercial licenses, since they want to limit the maximum retail price. I think a project looking at the impact of this project on actual textbook availability and use in Indonesia would be great, but I don\\\'t know of anyone pursuing that. Stian

Random Stuff that Matters : Conceptually explicit representations for group learning and representational guidance

Mon, 6 Jun 2011 12:55:22 +0000

In the course we will probably do groups of about 20, which is still fairly big compared to most of the CSCL literature (\\\"a full class\\\"), whereas for a university course of course it is very small. This is also connected to how much TA-hours we are assigned etc. To be honest, there probably won\\\'t be much \\\"Knowledge Building\\\" or contribution to a central artefact - as long as students have some engagement with the readings that help them understand them better, and build on each other\\\'s ideas in the smaller groups, that\\\'s already pretty good.

Random Stuff that Matters : Conceptually explicit representations for group learning and representational guidance

Sat, 28 May 2011 15:45:23 +0000

I definitively think it should be kept in small groups. A question is how small. And what/how much/how to share back to the big group.

Random Stuff that Matters : Junior Researchr: A design proposal

Fri, 20 May 2011 00:44:27 +0000

Very good point. In fact, my current setup, which I will blog about as soon as I find the time, is a great mishmash of several different applications, held together with small Ruby scripts and AppleScript, javascript bookmarklets, php plugins, etc. However, it\\\'s taken me weeks of tinkering and several all-nighters, and right now, it\\\'s something that most of my friends in graduate school would neither be able to do, nor have the time to do. I wish some of these programs were made to more easily work together, and not impose a single workflow.

And even though some never citation management tools look fancy, I am surprised at the functionality they lack. \\\"Oh, you don\\\'t just want to insert a citation in a Word document, but also in your WordPress blog? In your wiki? You want to sync to your Kindle, and have the notes come back? You want to share those notes with others? You want to insert microformats in your blog post, so web spiders and Zotero semantically know about the citation you referenced? You want to write in MultiMarkdown, and seamlessly generate HTML, PDFs and DOCs?\\\" -- lot\\\'s of stuff we couldn\\\'t show in the video, because making such a video takes a lot of time, even for simple functionality.

Random Stuff that Matters : Guess that language

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 16:05:38 +0000

They do have very specific signatures, but that won\\\'t help you if you\\\'ve never heard them (or never paid attention). Wonder how \\\"the man in the street\\\" would do on this one. Would be fun to give it to a high school class in Norway or something to see. Could be part of their \\\"global studies\\\" curriculum :)

Random Stuff that Matters : Personal time tracker with Ruby and Growl

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 14:45:53 +0000

Thanks for your comment. I must admit I never actually ended up using it much. I also never wrote the interface for calculating statistics across days/weeks etc. Because it uses Growl (whose command line interface seems to differ slightly between versions), and a hotkey setup, it\\\'s also difficult for me to provide some kind of install package (this is something Ruby is really weak on in general)... so it remains kind of a hobby project for others who know Ruby and want to tinker.

I am surprised nobody else have made kind of a polished program with the same design - it seems obviously useful. Maybe someone will feel inspired - the idea is there for the taking.

Random Stuff that Matters : MA thesis on Open Educational Resources in China released, watch it fly

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:53:44 +0000

Why don\\\'t you do it? One of the things I\\\'d really like to see realized with this thesis is for other people to reuse it - that\\\'s why I included the license. I might not be as lucky as Cory Doctorow, who gets his books translated in five languages, and made into audiobooks and interpretative dance, but if you upload it to Wikiversity, and Veletsiano uploads it to Scribd, that\\\'s still an example I can use to show others why they should also use CC licenses on their theses, rather than just uploading them openly.

(And then I know you\\\'re no big fan of CC licenses, and I\\\'ll be happy to dedicate it to the public domain too, if you want me to :) I still want people to cite me, but I think they\\\'ll do that as a professional courtesy, rather than a legal obligation).

Random Stuff that Matters : Open Access Journals: CC Bait and Switch?

Wed, 12 May 2010 15:52:07 +0000

Daniel, I very much appreciate that your journals will stay OA. In my post, I highlighted two different things, one is that you had chosen a license that didn't seem to reflect your real intention. The second was that there was no mention of this license on the actual article page. After communicating with Dengshun Wang from your company, he has assured me that both of these issues will be rectified. That is great, and I am happy that you are so open to suggestions and advice. I hope other publishers will follow your example. Stian

Random Stuff that Matters : Open Scholars and Divergence/Convergence, Groups/Networks

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:34:51 +0000

Hi Najmeh, thanks a lot for the comment. Yes, I think we are seeing a lot of interesting tools that try to make it easier to bring together information, however so far most of the tools I have seen have been trying to "choose the wheat from the chaff" so people don't drown in from the fire hose, which is valuable in itself. But I haven't seen that many tools or platforms that let/or encourage you to really work with the information to build something new, and deeper (or higher order)... Jim Hewitt has the idea of combining a wiki with a discussion forum, to combine the "stream of conversation" with the "integrative" aspect of a collaboratively edited wiki. I would still love to hear more about the difference between a wiki and knowledge forum, but I wonder if that could be one way - if people could somehow be induced to update a wiki, as they post on their blogs around the world... But how to induce/facilitate that? And I suppose it would become less useful, the less agreed the group was about what their common object of learning/inquiry were? In some ways though, it's like a survey article. And I've often wished there were really good survey articles maintained more like a wiki, and less like something that is published and then becomes obsolete. There are lot's of fields I'd like to move into, where I feel immediately lost, not "knowing the landscape"... (This goes for countries and languages too - I'd love to know what the "state of the art" in Chinese research on OER is, but I have no idea where to start). Stian

NRKbeta: NRKs sandkasse for teknologi og nye medier : NRK setter opp sin egen torrent-tracker og legger ut populær serie

Sun, 8 Mar 2009 19:41:26 +0000

Veldig flott at dere legger ut dette, gleder meg til å se! Pratet faktisk med en representant fra Miro på en konferanse i California som fortalte dette, og ble veldig gledelig overrasket. Desverre lastes det ned ganske tregt i Canada, litt pga få lokale peers kanskje, men mest fordi det er så lite konkurranse mellom ISPene her, og de fleste throttler torrents. Men det er jo ikke NRK sin feil - tvert i mot, jo mer legitimt torrent innehold som finnes, jo sterkere blir saken for nettnøytralitet! Legger dere ut dette med en åpen lisens også? Har en kamerat som kanskje er interessert i å fansubbe til kinesisk, og srtene gjør jo dette mye enklere (har time codes), men har han rett til å så legge ut den nye versjonen, med kinesisk undertekst, på en kinesisk bittorrent site? Stå på! Stian

Random Stuff that Matters : Release early, release often: Hindi-English StarDict dictionary

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 14:32:28 +0000

Thank's a lot for letting me know. I have made the files available again.

Random Stuff that Matters : How to restore your hacked WordPress database from Google Cache through Ruby

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 12:16:32 +0000

Steven, it probably took me something like three hours. But as I said, that program could have been written in 20 minutes by someone who used Ruby on a daily basis (it's not even difficult Ruby, I had to look up the syntax for even simple stuff). And yes, I thought I had a backup floating around on my hd, but couldn't find it. I relied far too much on my host - quite ridiculous really, I know.

Random Stuff that Matters : Blog hacked - returns from the dead

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 12:14:21 +0000

Haha, just too late for me :) But that sounds great. Thanks for letting me know. I've otherwise been very happy with Site5's service.

Random Stuff that Matters : cv-stian-haklev-feb-2009

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:14:18 +0000

This is my first comment to Turadg, it was supposed to be displayed, but somehow it got lost. -- Thank you for your comment. I am really not sure if it would be detrimental or not. One important point is that as far as I understand, this functions as a pre-processor, "translating" the Chinese commands into English commands before compilation/running. Since there is a one-to-one correlation in this case, there isn't any of the ambiguity or problems connected to Machine Translation. Thus, theoretically one could easily "translate" a Python program from/to Chinese. However, one change had to made to Python because currently it doesn't support identifier(functions, variables) names in unicode. Python 3 will support this natively, however, and then your proposal will be possible. I think it might already be possible in Javascript, because I've seen webpage sources where they used Chinese-language variables. As I mentioned though, a big problem is libraries. For example, if you are writing a program for KDE on Linux, there are extremely few identifiers in C or C++ itself (if, while etc), but extremely many in the KDE libraries (QtWindow::CreateWidget.SetProperty etc). I'd love to see if anyone had done research on this. Stian

Random Stuff that Matters : cv-stian-haklev-feb-2009

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:12:16 +0000

I agree completely. What I was thinking about was to use Python to teach simple logics and ideas to kids, most of whom might not go on to program (or if they ever picked it up later, would perhaps write in Ruby or in Javascript or some fancy newfangled language anyway). In that case, I think this might be a good idea. Some people argue that programming should be an obligatory class in school by now. Not a specific language, but the idea. Especially with scripting languages becoming so available, you don't have to be a comp sci major to have an interest in this anymore. The number of times I needed to do something simple with text, or spider some webpages etc, and did a few lines of Ruby. Anyway, it will be very interesting to see where this goes, and I wish someone would research it. (I need to clone myself :)) Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Stian

Random Stuff that Matters : Public domain books in many languages

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 06:58:23 +0000

Micah, curl and wget are pretty similar, the problem is that the site is producing temporary URLs that are very easily rendered invalid (ie by the time you have stripped them out of the HTML and gotten around to start "mass downloading")... I'd probably have to write some Ruby code to get around it. But it would be a lot of hazzle.

Random Stuff that Matters : OCWC Logan 08: news and reflections

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 07:36:16 +0000

Great, I am looking forward to reading this!

You should consider contributing it to the OER research repository at IssueLab, so others can come across it as well.

http://oer.issuelab.org/contribute
/>
Stian