Category: general

MIT has done it again. After the MIT courseware and open source courses online, now it has created a space for researchers on Dspace which was “built to save, share, and search MIT’s digital research materials”. It even has theses collections. That is a fantastic resource.

Here are some more resources:

• Sofia from Gavilan College
• Connexions: where you can gather modules and compile a course. It also has open textbooks.
• Merlot: a repository of materials, animation, research and everything you need to build a course
• Open Michigan
• Dash: Harvard’s open repository
• Open courseware search engine

Publishing venues and open online journals:

• JOLT: Journal of Online Teaching and Learning
• Virtual Center for Online Learning and Research.
• The Journal of Visualized Experiments [JOVE] [medical and sciences oriented]
• PLOS [Public Library of Science]. Submit research and it is peer reviewed.
• IJLM International Journal of Learning and Media. MIT
• Vectors University of CA.
• Center for History and New Media. It also has several projects, one of them is Project Zotera [to help save and organize your bibliography]. Another is providing digital tools for research, and a third for online curricula. It even has a search tool called Syllabus Finder!

I found this fascinating because it is finally an attempt at using proper Arabic content. Yamli is a new Arabic search engine. When I typed my name in English, it actually immediately translated it into Arabic as I was writing. I then tried to type a whole English transliterated sentence and Yamli immediately changed the lettering from English to Arabic as I was typing. This is what Yamli calls the ‘smart keyboard‘, and I must say it is quite smart. I am impressed.

The search engine itself has a very unique and different interface that I also found quite interesting.

Yamli was created by two Lebanese men, Habib Haddad and  Imad Jureidini, and the idea came during the most recent war on Lebanon in 2006. Yamli’s definition of itself is that it “is a search engine focused on providing more relevant search results for an Arabic query by expanding it to its most frequently used Latin representations.”

The word Yamli itself comes from the Arabic to dictate – or, as Yamli itself says “The word Yamli is inspired by the Arabic verb “?????” which comes from the noun “?????” referring to dictation or transcription of spoken text.” One can even embed Yamli in their website through the Yamli API.

Job well done and I look forward to how this will develop further.