http://mitworld.mit.edu/ MIT World media in category 'Education'. en-us Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:01:00 GMT Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/724 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/724 Rickshaw drivers in India are frequent victims of tuberculosis after just a few years inhaling traffic fumes. This near-epidemic went unacknowledged until
Kapil Sibal demanded a solution. The fix, now gaining traction across the country, is a solar-powered vehicle that eliminates pedaling. But what began as a project to assist his nation’s afflicted rickshaw drivers has broadened into a much grander scheme in Sibal’s hands. Project 800 is a government venture to apply science and technology to better the lives of India’s 800 million citizens facing a multitude of hardships.

Sibal’s mission at MIT is not merely to communicate his people’s great challenges, but to recruit. He is candid: “MIT should be a partner in Project 800,” helping to solve the “ordinary problems of ordinary men with ordinary lives.” Sibal wonders how the globalization of trade, manufacturing and services alone will solve the extraordinary problems of India in the 21st century: feeding a growing population with a limited amount of arable land just as the green revolution has gone “gray;” managing the impacts of global warming and greater energy demands; and the spread of health threats that respect no national borders. Solutions to these problems, Sibal believes, depend in large part on the globalization of education -- the dissemination of scientific and technical know-how from places like MIT to India.

But this flow of transformative ideas, warns Sibal, requires a “change in the mindset of educational institutions.” They must begin to perceive their community as global, and also be willing to move where they are needed. “They are not silos of knowledge living in one part of the world, protecting the national interest, saying as long as we’re OK, it doesn’t matter what else is happening in the world.” Academic institutions must find common cause with other communities, learn that problems thousands of miles away have the power to touch home. “There should be an element of self-interest. It should be win-win,” says Sibal.

To that end, Sibal invites MIT to partner with India on site in projects “to combat the challenges of tomorrow.” He sees natural affiliations that increase the odds for success in these collaborations: “freedom of speech, diversity of culture, the enormous ability to have dialog.” MIT also lends such ventures another advantage, says Sibal -- a woman president, “who has the vision to create, nurture and transform.” ]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/699 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/699 The field of systems engineering has only recently emerged, and as this symposium demonstrates, defies precise definition. But MIT has taken this evolving area to heart, nurturing a new division and encouraging a raft of ventures that in their execution, may help shape the field for the next century.

An MIT freshman in 1900 had some very specific requirements to fulfill for graduation, and to prepare for a responsible role in society, says Subra Suresh. Courses included mechanical drawing, military science and rhetoric. These choices became richer over time, with the addition of hundreds of engineering faculty, dealing increasingly with the sciences. Suresh traces how over many decades an engineering concentration on metallurgy shifted from studying mining (iron), to aviation (aluminum), plastics, electronic materials and then biological materials. But at each step, he notes, MIT “always lagged behind about 10 years” in what it taught students.”

The Engineering Systems Division (ESD) is an attempt to “train people the right way.” The curriculum brings the basic rules of nature into engineering practice, and applies discoveries to products and processes that impact people. Students must take into account the “long term societal impact.” ESD is needed to link complex issues along technological and social dimensions. The modern engineer must create new ideas and technologies, and reinvent tools and technologies from earlier times -- as Suresh puts it, “Fix problems associated with the greatest achievements of the 20th century.”

Yossi Sheffi fine tunes the picture, enumerating the key domains under the ESD umbrella, as well as the approaches faculty have adopted, in research, teaching and real-world projects. The primary distinction between other engineers and ESD engineers, Sheffi notes, is that “we try to look at the big picture.” So ESD focuses on critical infrastructure (water, transportation), such extended enterprise as supply chain management and global factories; energy sustainability and health care delivery. To get a handle on such unwieldy subjects, professors examine the human-technological interface, and delve into uncertainty, dynamics, design and implementation, networks and flows, and policy and standards.

MIT’s “engineers without labs” are seeking to “develop insights, principles and tools across all systems,” forging partnerships in industry, around the world. ESD students and faculty must get out in the field, says Sheffi, not just to fulfill course requirements but in order to tackle significant global problems, and to find solutions that are sustainable in terms of social equity, economic development and environmental impact. ESD values and accepts “intellectual risk,” meaning issues that may appear unquantifiable or vague, even without solution, and understands that problem solving means respecting and bringing together all disciplines, including the social sciences and management. ]]> Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/696 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/696 It’s a good thing for a world increasingly beset by mammoth challenges that universities are responding with new engineering systems programs. These initiatives, as Daniel Roos attests, are swiftly proliferating in the U.S. and abroad to equip students to address such complex issues as health care, sustainable energy, and infrastructure. Roos celebrates the fifth year of the Council of Engineering Systems Universities (CESUN), one of this symposium’s sponsors, and recaps his survey of group members on the state of engineering systems education.

While some traditionalists resist the interdisciplinary dimensions and broad compass featured so prominently in engineering systems programs, Roos believes that rapid global change necessitates corresponding change in how engineers are trained to think and practice. A case in point: a collapsing 100-year-old automobile and transportation system whose revival must incorporate complex, networked systems: intelligent infrastructure that can improve safety and alleviate congestion; and new, green, digitally wired vehicles integrated in a “smart energy net.”

ESD researchers study the complex social/technological questions that “will increasingly determine the future,” says Susan Hockfield. At MIT, Hockfield's job “is to lower boundaries that still exist between departments, and schools. By bringing together faculty, ESD creates enormous energy."

Charles Vest tells his audience, “Your time has come,” but warns that the U.S. lags dangerously far behind other nations in graduating engineers. Redesigning college-level engineering programs won’t be enough to meet the “grand challenges” posed by our times, if more children can’t be inspired to study engineering. The field lacks luster, and simply doesn’t connect with young people, says Vest. “We have failed miserably in projecting what engineering is, what it can accomplish and what’s exciting.”

The nation faces a great opportunity “to start rebuilding the economy based on real engineering innovations, to produce real goods and services, providing real value to people and society.” Vest wants to draw young people to work “at the frontiers of technology.” He notes a lot of interest in “tiny systems” such as biology, information and nano-technology. But “we need to worry” about the big macro systems of energy, environment, healthcare, manufacturing –“where the rubber hits the road between engineering and society.”

Vest wants to capture the passion of the next generation through some “soul stirring.” Through a campaign involving government, industry, and media, Vest hopes to convince young people that engineers are vital to meeting the “Engineering Grand Challenges” of global warming and sustainable energy, improving medicine and healthcare delivery, reducing vulnerability to human and natural threats, and expanding and enhancing human capability and joy (a somewhat unusual category for engineers, Vest admits).

Vest concludes with some personal comments about engineering systems, including anecdotes about Toyota’s innovations in auto assembly; NASA’s hard-won lessons in integrated design and manufacture of space-bound vehicles; and improvements in hospital care following simple changes integrated system wide. He sees the implosion of our financial system as an opportunity to study an incredibly complex human-technological system and set in place “at least an early warning system.” Vest also finds cheer in the public’s budding grasp of complex systems, as witnessed by increasing discomfort with fuel-based ethanol. ]]> Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/695 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/695 Visiting the San Diego Zoo’s orangutans and chimpanzees inspires Patrick Henry Winston to ponder what makes humans different from our primate cousins. His field of artificial intelligence extends that question to thinking about how humans differ from computers. Winston’s goal is to “develop a computational theory of intelligence.”

Bridging the gap from people to machines requires a complex understanding of how we think. Winston asserts we think with our eyes, our hands, our mouth. Humans rely upon visual, motor, and linguistic faculties to learn and solve problems. Perceptual powers enable naming, describing, categorizing and recalling. In the aggregate, these processes are “commonsense,” a hallmark of cognition that Winston aims to vest in computer programs -- to endow transistors with the nuanced capabilities of neurons.

Crucially, we also think with our stories. Throughout childhood and formal education, we are taught via fairy tales, myths, history, literature, religion, and popular entertainment. Professional disciplines like law, science, medicine, engineering, and business are conveyed through stories too.

Recognizing patterns, relationships, and mistakes, as well as abstract concepts like revenge or success, helps us explain, predict, answer questions. The delicate processes of extracting knowledge and capturing meaning may appear seamless or instinctive in the evolved mind, but must be parsed syntactically to “teach” a computer to achieve the same ends.

What might be practical applications “for systems that understood stories”? Winston suggests that decision-making in business and military strategy would benefit. And no less, comprehending cultures. If a computer program could derive clues from context, perhaps it could determine why “what plays in Peoria” doesn’t translate to Baghdad.

Early efforts to build a computational theory of intelligence focused on “symbolic integration…We figured out how to make programs do calculus by 1960…but computers remained as dumb as stones,” Winston says. When we progressed to building robots -- “things that move” -- language was still lacking. “We forgot that the distinguishing characteristic of human intelligence is that linguistic veneer that stands above our perceptual apparatus,” he remarks.

A paradox emerging from Winston’s study of how humans think is that “computers make us stupid.” For instance, when students are freed from taking notes, absence of “forced engagement” with the material hinders learning. He cautions that teachers confuse the “presentation of information with the delivery of information.” Too many words on a slide (or talking too fast) “jams the language processor” and impedes digesting content.

Winston summarizes with an appealing prescription for becoming smarter. “Take notes…draw pictures…talk and imagine…tell stories!” The very act of explaining to another elucidates a lesson for oneself. ]]> Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/648 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/648 Two students deliver heartfelt appeals for courage and integrity at the annual Martin Luther King Day breakfast.

In the 1940s, Matt Gethers recounts, his grandfather was forced to flee South Carolina after defending his brother against white racists in a store. Gethers wonders if he’d have put his life on the line in the same way. He acknowledges the “bittersweet reality” that he won’t likely be facing the trials of his ancestors, while also wishing to “share in the work and sacrifice that secured my inalienable rights as a citizen of this country and the world.”

While U.S. institutions seem to reflect “what we know to be right with respect to race, gender and disability,” Gethers notes that there’s a more corrosive racism eating away at “hearts and minds.” The absence of diversity in leadership throughout U.S. society encourages stereotyping. In his work in the Cambridge Public Schools, Gethers meets students who believe they couldn’t possibly grow up to be “an astronaut, physicist, mathematician or president.” Why? “Because little black girls don’t grow up to become CEOs.” Gethers concludes that only when these students see themselves “in people who are breaking the mold …will we restore their sacred right to dream.”

Joy Johnson was almost cheated of a college scholarship by a high school counselor who “forgot” to send her transcript in. Entrenched racism has helped create the “impostor syndrome,” says Johnson, whose “sufferers can’t internalize their own accomplishments and thus feel they don’t deserve them.” She wonders how many fellow MIT students are asking themselves, “Do we even belong here, and what do we need to do to become as smart as the others?” But “many times the impostor is not us at all,” says Johnson. She sees a long, sorry tale of the usurpation of black achievements, inventions and discoveries: “Impostors have been doing it so long, they’ve perfected the very art of fraud.”

But what must be done to ensure that the contributions of black people are recognized? Johnson nods toward MIT’s mission -- inclusive of all students -- of advancing knowledge to serve the nation and world. True innovation and intellectual advancement, she says, require respectful interactions not just in labs and classrooms, but in everyday life. “This must begin with acknowledgments, speaking to … janitors and lab techs and bus drivers as eagerly as we speak to professors.” Johnson ultimately hopes to “show the world that at this institution, decisions are made on merit, not on nepotism, cronyism or racism.” ]]> Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/613 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/613 MIT produces students who are “deep, entrepreneurial, passionate, diverse and active,” says Phillip Clay, the kind of talented individuals who should play major parts on the world stage. MIT has begun a drive to ensure that its students fulfill their promise. Central to this mission, Richard Samuels says, is the kind of education that steeps students in the realities of globalization. In a world that’s not so much flat as converging and increasingly complex and diverse, students must “step boldly and intelligently into the global market of ideas and commerce,” says Samuels, lest they “become cogs in a global machine.” MIT hopes “to create the people who design and operate those machines.”

This means making international studies a core part of the MIT experience, and establishing MIT in an international context. At a time when MIT faces increased global competition, Subra Suresh worries that flat and reduced federal research funding will cut into MIT’s research preeminence. So the School of Engineering is seeking out partnerships around the world for faculty, and looking to provide its undergraduates with exchange and practicum opportunities abroad.

All over the world, “countries want to reproduce MIT,” says Marc Kastner. But MIT’s unique culture is difficult to replicate: the Institute pours resources into the youngest students and faculty; promotes an egalitarian atmosphere; draws instructors from an international talent pool; and is “great in everything” -- science, engineering, liberal arts and business. As MIT seeks out international alliances, “We must think about how to communicate to our partners what’s important about our culture,” he says.

The “crown jewel” of MIT’s international programs is the MIT International Science and Technology Initiative (MISTI), says Deborah Fitzgerald. More than 300 MIT students each year get to spend time working in a company in another country, at no expense to them. A program that often requires two years of language, history and culture study, MISTI boosts confidence, says Fitzgerald, allowing students to see themselves “as people who can solve any kind of problem, anywhere, in a foreign language” -- a “great vindication of all they’ve worked so hard for.” Fitzgerald’s wish is to make MISTI possible for every student.

MIT Sloan is committed to developing principled and innovative leaders who can improve the world, says Dave Schmittlein. The school has developed a Center for Leadership that emphasizes “values, transparency, consistency in decision making,” and provides its budding leaders with international experience through a global entrepreneurship lab that operates in 17 different countries.

Adele Naudé Santos declares herself “passionately opposed to outposts” in foreign lands, because it would be impossible to clone MIT’s collaborative, multidisciplinary, nonhierarchical ethos. Instead, “we partner,” she says. Students and faculty work and study with colleagues abroad in projects like the Urbanization Laboratory, which develops sustainable designs for new cities in such nations as India, China and Japan. Graduates in architecture and planning migrate to all corners of the globe, carrying their unique experience and MIT’s culture with them. ]]> Sun, 14 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/597 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/597 The Latin motto on the MIT seal, mens et manus – mind and hand – encapsulates Anjali Sastry’s view of the combined theoretical and practical education that students gain at the Institute. She cites MIT founder William Barton Rogers’s 1860 exhortation for “the most earnest cooperation of intelligent culture with industrial pursuits” as the paradigm of learning by doing, the ideal way to gain and apply knowledge. This undergirds her approach to teaching in tandem with projects in which students practice, test, reflect, share, and thereby enact change for the benefit of an enterprise.

The need for practice is a constant theme in Sastry’s view of learning. Just as in music, sports, and chess, practice in management skills results in organizational improvement. That is why she considers it imperative that students have opportunities to apply theory to real-world situations. Such hypothesis testing is the logical and essential extension of rigorous study. It takes place in many forms: team projects, extracurricular activities, competitions, and internships.

Sastry endorses David Kolb’s “learning loop” model: concrete experience, observation and reflection, forming abstract concepts, then further implementing and analyzing. She ponders if this cycle can transcend classroom learning to engender change in the world. Her own research and consulting in health care delivery are based on such a stepped method. She stresses that an integrated, holistic perspective is also required. For instance, a malnourished patient will be unable to absorb drugs administered for AIDS; medicine is insufficient without food. As to the larger picture, she says “obviously we’ve got to tackle global warming and carbon emissions, but we also need to tackle poverty.”

Sastry reminds us to recognize our intrinsic biases in examining data, leading to flawed conclusions. “Humans are prey to a variety of very systematic and known challenges to their thinking,” she says. To reinforce the point, she displays a list of 42 types of judgment errors, but adds that we can train ourselves to catch these fallacies through conscious attention.

Another principle of Sastry’s canon is the need for sharing ideas, “community conversations” as she calls it. She believes cumulative individual knowledge alone is not enough to bear fruit. Experience must be evaluated collaboratively to build a body of useful wisdom. She asserts that this is where promise lies to ameliorate great issues facing society.

In short, Sastry’s formula, informed by system dynamics, is “Act. Review. Improve.” Finally, she recommends that we inculcate “a culture of hope” in our efforts: we must believe that change is indeed possible. ]]> Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/591 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/591 At the very moment when “we have to confront the opportunity or challenge of globalization,” says Allan Goodman, higher education appears woefully unprepared. The world is not ‘flat’ for the vast majority of college students.

Only 30 of 192 U.N. member states boast enrollments of international students at levels that exceed 1%. In the U.S., it is a little over 3%. Of the 2.7 million international students, 600 thousand come to the U.S. -- most hoping to end up at Harvard, according to Goodman. They are distributed among just 150 schools, usually in very small numbers. This is bad news, because “never has there been a more difficult time for us in the world,” says Goodman, and education exchange broadens not just the “knowledge enterprise” but enhances the image of both host and origin country.

Goodman worries about a shortfall in capacity, as developing countries graduate students from secondary schools with no, few or bad choices for college. The U.S. has 4000 accredited higher education institutions, 1/3rd of all such institutions in the world, and employs 2/3rds of the world’s faculty. Cairo University has 250 thousand students, many of whom have never seen a professor or entered a classroom. By the end of this decade, one university in Nanjing will have a million students, but won’t have enough space to educate them. It’s no wonder there’s increasing pressure to come to the U.S. for an education. Who is going to teach the 200 million or so people who will be trying to attend universities by 2025, wonders Goodman. That will be the “single biggest challenge for educators everywhere, whether you’re in Cambridge, Chile or China.”

MIT and other world-class universities should develop their own multilateral foreign policy, says Goodman, enabling students to enter from all over the world, and for U.S. students to study elsewhere. 75% of Americans currently don’t have passports; foreign language study, from elementary school through college, is no longer required. This must change, says Goodman. U.S. students and older scholars who travel to other parts of the world “can be genuine voices of our society and culture,” perhaps staying to “build a bridge in China” or cars in Germany. They might even help develop educational resources in another country, serving the rising tide of students overseas. It’s time to change the paradigm, says Goodman: “I think we should aspire to say, to be educated in America means you need to have international (study) as part of your education.” ]]> Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/566 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/566 While Martin Luther King might be amazed to see what blacks, Hispanics and women have accomplished since his time, says Ray Hammond, we must take an honest look at the “state of his dreams” today, and ask, “Where do we go from here?” This is a question that MIT President Susan Hockfield has also taken to heart. Hockfield admits that “despite the intense, unrelenting and committed work of many people,” MIT has failed to create the serious, meaningful diversity and inclusion “that we long for.” Says Hockfield, “We cannot be satisfied until, to everyone who earns a place at MIT, we are a community that says not “You’re lucky to be here,” but rather, “We’re lucky you came.” Hockfield sees diversity as an “obvious moral imperative,” essential at MIT, which educates students “who in a thousand ways will lead the nation.” She plans to convene a Diversity Leadership Congress, a group that will include all 300 or so of the Institute’s academic and administrative leaders, to develop goals for changing the way MIT operates. Hockfield has also begun an initiative to address faculty race and diversity issues.

Ray Hammond believes MIT and other elite academic institutions have a unique role to play in the “post-Civil Rights era.” He cites three areas essential in strengthening a commitment to educational access. The first, which he calls “pipeline,” involves ensuring a steady flow of scientists and engineers. By the middle of the 21st century, there will be no majority population in the U.S., and white students alone won’t suffice to fill jobs in science and technology. Black, Hispanic and female students must be shown the way into these fields, says Hammond, and one way is through providing “mentors and role models.”

Pedagogy is the next step. Once in college, black and Hispanic students often fail introductory courses and drop out or turn away from science. Hammond cites a study showing how certain methods help keep minority students on track in these courses, including working groups that network and share strategies for success. Universities must put such models into place, or risk cheating “all of our students.”

Hammond says the final issue for the research university lies in the realm of social policy. Scientists should not be responsible only for discoveries. “Scientists and engineers must be educators, debaters, advisors, and, sometimes, deciders. What they cannot be are the monolithic, mono- or bi-racial, and unrepresentative guardians of information and wielders of authority.”

Hammond says that we “know how to tolerate situations of inequity and to try to put the best face on them as the ways things are or as the way God intended them to be or as the fault of those not as gifted as ourselves.” Research universities like MIT “can make a firm, moral and practical commitment to opening the doors of opportunity ever wider to an ever growing circle of people.” ]]> Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/565 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/565 Two MIT students honor their experience at MIT, but ask that the Institute acknowledge an unequal world and embrace a larger mission.

Jamira Cotton has long understood the privilege, and burden, of representing an entire community. She attended a middle school for gifted and talented children as only one of five black female students. Her parents early on instilled in her the “charge to be a leader.” In public high school she realized “not only did I need to be the smart enough black girl for my white peers, but I had to be the black enough smart girl for my black peers.” Cotton feels deeply W.E.B. DuBois’ call ‘to elevate the race and carry the community forward.’ At MIT, Cotton is engaged in research to figure out whether MIT is creating an environment that successfully nurtures leaders, that graduates students with a sense of responsibility. “Our challenge as a higher institution is to ensure that every student is receiving the best education they need for what they must do,” says Cotton.

Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities frames Kenneth Kweku Bota’s talk. Cambridge and its two preeminent universities -- places of enlightenment and discovery -- represent the best of times. But just across the Charles, for Boston’s neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan, it is the worst of times. Bota notes that “few students who attend MIT and Harvard…will ever leave their comfortable nests and… meet a child who attends schools that have become dilapidated and lack adequate books, computers and other critical learning materials.”

Bota has made this effort, as a Big Brother to a 12-year-old Dorchester boy. Last summer they toured MIT together, and the child noted with envy, and some displeasure, his lack of access to computers and books. While MIT provides abundant resources, says Bota, “no matter how smart and innovative we are in using them, we will not achieve and witness the full spirit of Dr. King unless we begin to commit ourselves to helping those who are less fortunate than we are.” As a great citadel of scientific achievement, MIT become even greater if it reaches out to the surrounding communities “in an effort to close the gap in educational attainment and access between black and white, women and men, and yes, Cambridge and Roxbury.” ]]> Wed, 28 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/560 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/560 Spurred by such real-world challenges as global warming, Carl Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, has transformed his curiosity about improving science education into a vocation. Wieman is convinced that science education must be improved, not simply to inspire and train the next generation of scientists, but to educate a citizenry “to make wise decisions on tough questions.”

Unhappy with the apparent lack of impact his undergraduate physics courses had on students, Wieman began a personal odyssey to discover why traditional methods of teaching science -- the massive lecture hall, the fact-filled lectures -- seemed to fail in the task of conveying key concepts, much less exciting listeners. He delved into cognitive psychology research, and learned that when students are passive, they retain a mere 10% of the facts conveyed to them, and that indeed, the human brain has a limited amount of RAM. Our working memory can hold around seven items. In addition, students simply “do not develop a good understanding of concepts by hearing them explained in lectures.” The brain is like a muscle that must be built up, especially the structures involving long-term memory, Wieman learned, and “to develop the brain requires a strenuous effort over a long time.”

Wieman then pursued notions of effective teaching practices, those that would allow students to develop their own understanding, by “thinking hard about a subject and then monitoring and guiding that thinking.” The pedagogical principles he ultimately distilled include: employing an expert individual tutor to motivate, pose questions to and interact with students; and probing “where students are starting from and connect with them,” finding ways to have students challenge, explain and critique each other, with feedback from the tutor.

Wieman acknowledges the difficulty of deploying these methods in a large class, but suggests utilizing technology to assist. He finds particularly helpful interactive lectures with hand-held clickers to help gauge student understanding. Wieman also advocates highly interactive simulations, enabling students to “build a circuit on computers,” for instance. He also backs homework problems “that go toward building expert thinking,” part of the effortful practice the brain needs to generate more proteins for long term memory. Ultimately, we “must approach teaching like we do science,” says Wieman, testing the effectiveness of different methods and putting the results of such research to use in the classroom. ]]> Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/540 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/540 Robert Silbey is an old hand at teaching chemistry (40 years and counting), yet each time he turns to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, he’s “always very nervous.” From this panel of educators, we get a sense of how challenging a classroom subject the Second Law can be.

Joseph Smith notes that the teaching approach “depends on the application,” and applications are both theoretical and practical. Students must first ask what is entropy, and why is it needed, says Smith. He focuses on “idealizations that often get ignored,” such as isolation, equilibrium and system boundaries. “If we don’t get those straight in the beginning student’s mind, then there’s a lot of confusion.”

To Howard Butler’s way of thinking, “teaching the Second Law is much more difficult and challenging a task than teaching Newton’s Second Law of Motion,” both because the concepts involved are so much more complex and abstract, and because the Second Law takes on very different forms depending on which thermodynamic domain is being considered.”

Andrew Foley “tries not to worry too much about what entropy is.” Instead, he handles the whole concept as if it were an accounting problem: “money being moved through a mint.” We can “shove the property of energy instead of money, and produce a form of accounting for energy equations.” Says Foley, “First Law, Second Law -- it’s all accounting.”

As engineering and biology converge, “it’s important that students understand the thermodynamics of biological molecules,” says Kim Hamad- Schifferli. She demonstrates the Boltzmann distribution with such biological examples as the coiling of DNA from its double-stranded to single-stranded form. Hamad- Schifferli acknowledges that entropy is very difficult for students to grasp viscerally, and that “one thing that helps greatly is the lattice model -- the entropy of mixing two gases, for example.”

Bernhardt Trout also invokes Boltzmann, “who believed in atoms vehemently, without substantive proof.” This is because “he didn’t want to believe in the soul, he wanted to believe we are nothing but matter and motion.” Trout says that while we can get a more accurate, mathematical description of atoms, “we owe it to our students to teach them about these most fundamental issues to try to reengage the original questions in the original context in which they existed.”

Jeffery Lewins reminisces about being “Keenanized” during his college years. He notes that “in the great book, Professor Keenan uses the energy-entropy volume space quite late to discuss equilibrium.” Lewins suggests that more can be made of this space in teaching.

Enzo Zanchini discusses “a rigorous definition of entropy valid also for nonequilibrium states.” He considers closed systems, and lays out a thorough set of basic definitions, going over the First Law and energy, and the Second Law and entropy.

“There are so many textbooks on thermodynamics, so many schools of thought, says Michael von Spakovsky because “there is not a whole lot of agreement on a lot of things.” He recounts how a unified theory developed at MIT helped resolve key issues in thermodynamics, by proposing “a broader, self-consistent quantum kinematics and dynamics. … Entropy becomes an intrinsic property of matter, including single particles.” ]]> Mon, 03 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/532 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/532 Video games could transform the world some day, if only their potential could be fully realized. These panelists dream of a day when industry, politicians and game players themselves explore how this new medium can educate and engage.

Mario Armstrong has been helping middle school students from under-served neighborhoods develop their own games. Taking these children through the design cycle, from working on a narrative story through composing what’s on screen, he “ties the development cycle to core academics.” Kids learn about the x and y axis, and gain knowledge of geometry, Armstrong says, as well as the physics behind animation, and the importance of sentence structure.

The kinds of concerns they bring to their games initially surprised him. He had imagined storylines involving music and fashion, and instead saw “games about how to impact poverty, about how to clean up trash in my neighborhood, about whether to make a decision to buy food or pay the electric bill.” Children want to simulate and master a complex world, Armstrong says, and “games create a platform they can relate to, where they discuss outcomes and rewards,” and ultimately enable them “to talk about politics and civic engagement.” At the very least, games are “a powerful way of shaping their exposure to making an impact on society.”

The alternative to Grand Theft Auto lies with games that model real-world experience.
Ian Bogost takes the complex issues we actually face, such as immigration, or the pros and cons of wind energy, or nutritional choices, and placing them inside the infinitely flexible worlds of computer games. By creating characters inside these worlds, and giving them choices, we might learn how to address policy questions in the real world. “I don’t think games have to be fun,” says Bogost, but there are many ways games can be educational. What interests Bogost is to “live in a world you don’t construct, you don’t choose, and understand someone else’s perspective – that’s really powerful.”

In public discourse and as a political tool, games have been neglected in favor of websites, blogging and social networks. But ultimately, Bogost believes, games may result in a more sophisticated citizenry. They can personalize moral questions, and lead people “to possible moments of questioning or reform,” to a recognition that choices matter. Bogost believes designers of such games must push beyond traditional political terms, and create possibilities for people to see how policies work and matter -- new ways to frame public policy issues. ]]> Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/516 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/516 Jim Yong Kim and Partners in Health are paradoxically suffering from their own success. They demonstrated over the past decade that it is possible to set up effective HIV and primary care clinics in such developing nations as Haiti, and that it’s possible to cure multiple drug resistant tuberculosis. They even managed to persuade pharmaceutical companies to permit the production of generic, less expensive antiretroviral medicines so they could be affordable to the poorest people. But now, as billions of dollars flow into efforts to attack diseases that needlessly kill and maim the world’s poor, we find ourselves “living in the middle of an implementation bottleneck,” says Kim.

Whether from the Gates or Clinton Foundations, or from international government initiatives, money is flowing into new products like HIV/AIDS vaccines, TB vaccines, microbicides, anti-malarial drugs, and surgical services such as male circumcision. It could all “have a huge impact,” says Kim, helping to forestall 10 million preventable deaths per year, but for the increasingly massive logjam in delivering all the care. Why is it so hard to distribute the expertise, technology, resources, to the people in need? There are all kinds of “just answers” that Kim gets: just align incentives; just make the markets work better; just fund infrastructures adequately; just give workers the management skills.

While he agrees that these are all relevant issues, Kim really wants an integrated response. He’d like to see medical schools like Harvard, where he’s on staff, develop the kind of case studies commonly employed at business and engineering schools to dissect complex strategy problems. For instance, medical students today have no idea how smallpox was eradicated – the story of this immense project combining management and epidemiology has been lost as a teaching tool. Just as Harvard Business School was “teaching the Jet Blue meltdown three weeks after it happened,” so must medical schools capture current problems and approach them both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Kim calls on institutions like MIT Sloan to help devise new analytic frameworks for examining and improving global health delivery. “There’s room for a whole new field, health care delivery science,” says Kim, combining multiple disciplines, and developing leaders to advance evidence based strategies. We can’t alleviate human suffering caused by disease “just being the lab, or by doing clinical research.” It’s now time “to build functioning health care systems everywhere in the world.” ]]> Wed, 09 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/515 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/515 Young children say many surprising and funny things – funny, often, because how they say it is not quite right in an endearing way. “My friend goed to the playground,” and “I ated two desserts” both demonstrate errors that we readily understand, sympathize with, and are confident will go away with further listening and speaking.

But there are other kinds of errors that children just don’t seem to make. In his pathbreaking work on transformational grammar, Noam Chomsky has written extensively about sentences like “The dog in the corner is hungry.” By applying a formal operation Chomsky described in detail, we can form the question “Is the dog in the corner hungry?” But confronted with “The dog that is in the corner is hungry,” we do not end up asking “Is the dog that in the corner is hungry?” Instead, we apply the transformational rule in a different, more complex way, to ask “Is the dog that is in the corner hungry?”

Chomsky draws two conclusions from close study of many such cases. First, he says, this shows that the transformational grammar rules we follow are “structure-dependent,” that is, they apply to phrases, not simply to a string of words in sequence. Second, because a person can go through life without recognizing or even encountering some structure-dependent cases – and yet make the correct choice when presented with alternatives – this aspect of grammar has deep implications for human psychology. In fact, Chomsky claims, this is an argument for the existence of invariant principles of language, a universal grammar.

Howard Lasnik cites evidence for a different interpretation: Chomsky’s “poverty of the stimulus” scenario may not be relevant. By examining a large collection of speech (drawn from the CHILDES database), and applying a Bayesian model of grammar induction – making use, in other words, of the speaker’s knowledge of prior probabilities – it is possible to show that a rational learner could in fact learn that transformational linguistic rules depend on phase structure.

Lasnik’s former student, now colleague, Juan Uriagereka, broadens the argument. Drawing on a startling range of examples – from animal behavior to protein folding, Uriagereka wonders if the structural properties of grammar are unique to human language, or extend to other forms of human cognition, including music, mathematics, and complex planning. Structure dependence may be true, it may be specific to language or at least to human thought … but how did it get there? Where does structure come from? These are the bold questions Lasnik and Uriagereka believe that contemporary linguistic cognitive science has to address. ]]> Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/512 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/512 How do kids manage to figure out that the word “dog” applies to a whole category of animals, not just one creature? Joshua Tenenbaum wants to understand how children and adults manage to solve such classic problems of induction. Throughout cognition, wherever you look, he says “we see places where we know more than we have a reasonable right to know about the world, places where we come to abstractions, generalizations, models of the world that go beyond our sparse, noisy, limited experience.” Tenenbaum’s goal is to come up with “general purpose computational tools for understanding how people solve these problems so successfully.”

He’s creating a set of hierarchical, probabilistic models that will help explain how humans make inductive leaps – how abstract knowledge that “guides and constrains our inferences” helps us acquire language from our earliest days. While his models can apply to many areas of cognition, Tenenbaum focuses on recent work with syntax. From very simple data, children manage to turn a complex declarative like “The girl who is sleeping is happy,” to a complex interrogative: “Is the girl who is sleeping happy?” They don’t say, “Is the girl who sleeping is happy?” Tenenbaum suggests that humans somehow identify the hierarchical phrase structure of language, and use this as an “inductive constraint to guide acquisition of a particular piece of syntax.”

Tenenbaum and his colleagues have built representative grammars using data from child-directed speech --2300 sentences that correspond to 20 thousand-plus utterances. He deconstructs these sentences so that each word is replaced by a syntactic category. “The baby bear discovers Goldilocks in his bed” becomes “det adj n v prop pre adj n.” He’s explored these grammars for their capacity to balance complexity, generalize appropriately, and ability to fit the data. His results indicate that “by having the right kind of inductive bias, the idea of hierarchical phrase structure, you can make generalizations which you have no evidence for…”

By probing what seem to be “innate domain general capacities,” says Tenenbaum, “we’re trying to formalize these arguments and use them as a tool to diagnose what has to be innate, or what is more or less plausibly part of Universal Grammar.” Tenenbaum sees his use of statistical inference methods as bolstering classical linguistics in its attempt to map out how humans learn from real data, and helping devise machine systems that might approach the capacities of human learners.

]]> Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/506 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/506 Christopher Manning thinks linguistics went astray in the 20th century when it searched “for homogeneity in language, under the misguided assumption that only homogeneous systems can be structured.” In the face of human creativity with language, rigid categories of linguistic use just don’t help explain how people actually talk and what they choose to say. For every hard and fast rule linguists find, other linguists can determine an exception. Categorical constraints rise, then come crashing down.

Manning argues for acceptance of variable systems of language, and for searching for structure in these systems using probabilistic methods. Manning applies quantitative techniques to sentence structure, digging for the frequency, probability and likelihood that people will use specific turns of phrase in certain real-world contexts. Looking at distributions in the ways people express ideas in a language “can give a much richer description of how language is used.” Indeed, Manning finds that certain typical constraints on sentence structure in one language “show up as softer constraints and preferences in other languages.”

Manning looks at raw data, like sentences from the Wall Street Journal, and gleans such information as typical word associations that begin to “tell us about the dependencies of verbs and arguments.” He looks for dependencies between words, the distance between them, and at a sentence’s flow from left to right. Classes of words emerge, and clusters, yielding distributionally learned categories. Certain classes of syntax naturally fall together. Manning builds nested phrase structure trees, and branching structures, and derives simple probabilistic models that help explain “gradual learning and robustness in acquisition, non-homogeneous grammars of individuals, and gradual language change over time.” Manning says computational linguistics is also proving useful in such applied fields as information retrieval, machine translation, and text mining. ]]> Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/505 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/505 This workshop, explains Michael Coen, is an effort to engender temperate, collaborative discussion of a matter that inspires hot dispute: whether machine learning helps explain how humans acquire language. In particular, says Coen, machine learning advocates believe they have evidence against Noam Chomsky’s “poverty of stimulus argument,” which in essence states that language is built into us, that “children don’t receive enough linguistic inputs to explain linguistic outputs.”

Coen, who doesn’t think much of such claims, worries about a deeper problem, that scientists have “begun to discuss engineering at the expense of science.” He describes 13-year-old Bobby Fischer’s astonishing match with a world chessmaster, where Fischer managed to look 16 moves ahead -- eliminating about 10 to the 30th board positions. We had no way to represent his thinking process then, and we don’t today, although scientists have built a machine, Deep Blue, that can topple any human chess champion. It seems there’s nothing left to say about chess, yet we know absolutely nothing about how humans play chess, says Coen. “If you’re an engineer, this may be fine, but if you’re a scientist, that’s deeply troubling.”

One problem with machine models, says Lila Gleitman, is that “they don’t try to learn what the human already knows,” and we really aren’t sure “how big a piece of the pie that is in the first place.” Gleitman distinguishes between acquiring language, and acquiring *a* language, like French or German. In her years of researching how children learn language, and specifically children who have been deprived of linguistic input entirely, Gleitman does not find a blank slate: “Children don’t just sit there; they start to make gestures.” Gleitman reviews various studies that describe a basic sequence in language acquisition that holds true regardless of specific ‘inputs.’ If researchers make models that are to be “of any interest, they ought to take into account the fact that you may not have to learn some of this.”

Gleitman has conducted simulations with adults, giving them incomplete scenes on video or paper (dropping words or substituting Lewis Carroll type doggerel) to see how we acquire the meaning of common nouns and verbs through contextual clues and inference. The more sources of evidence people get in these tests, the better they do. But such language acquisition “doesn’t scale up” to higher level categories of words,” such as “think.” Says Gleitman, “It’s crazy…to suppose there’s no biological given in a language learning situation. There’s plenty. Some of it is maybe the substance of language and some of that is about the sophisticated learning procedures themselves.” So any kind of “informative statistical modeling requires a matrix of conspiring cues, intrinsically ordered in time of appearance…Realistic models of incremental learning will incorporate what the learner brings to the task.” ]]> Sun, 09 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/474 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/474 If you are sufficiently new media literate, you might recognize this panel as a mash-up, combining but not homogenizing five distinctive interpretations of “remixing.” Each contributor has a unique project example to share, but in the end there is some convergence: remixing enables participation, and thus encourages creativity, ownership, and collaboration – the three attributes of contemporary digital culture celebrated in this edition of the annual Media in Transition conference.

One approach to learning through remixing is to provide tools that will expose the structure of media products, making it accessible to all. Modest digital editing, for example, allows a Star Trek fan to combine scattered “warp drive” commands into a countdown sequence: “Ahead warp 10! Go to warp 9! ...” With more sophisticated software, you can hop back and forth, in sync, between book and movie versions of Fellowship of the Ring, or even between two different film productions of Romeo and Juliet. Erik Blankinship and the Media Modifications group will soon unveil such tools on the Web at adapt.tv.

By remixing PacMan in their own voice, Juan Devis’ Latino students created a new video game, El Immingrante, about cleaning up their Los Angeles neighborhood while staying one step ahead of a pursuing vigilante enforcer. Reaching several rungs higher up on the cultural hierarchy, their new source is Huckleberry Finn, which they are adapting to 21st century LA in a game that aims to teach American history and civics.

Renee Hobbs, a longtime developer of media literacy curricula, sees remixing as a powerful way to highlight the “constructedness” of media content, and thus to reveal the plasticity of meaning. She has developed a suite of games that a girl can play to create her own song, by choosing a message, musical genre, set of lyrics, voice effects, and even designing a custom avatar to perform it. My Pop Studio, available on the Web since mid-2006, helps girls understand how music evokes an emotional response, while giving them the pleasure and sense of power that comes from manipulating familiar materials.

In yet another medium, theater, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley exploits remixing to make literacy more inclusive. He’s adopted quite a challenge: to make more compelling for young people, while preserving the integrity of the novel. For example, children don’t necessarily identify with a white whale, but they do understand “the vengeful pursuit of something that has hurt you,” when the white nemesis is translated into cocaine. Ultimately it takes a community to sustain literacy, and Pitts-Wiley hopes theater can enlist widespread interest and support, much as the Bible used to provide a shared literary resource for all races and classes of people in the West.

The academic study of new media literacy, a specialty of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, is now the center of a MacArthur Foundation-funded project. CMS fellow Alice Robison describes this effort to examine “what happens in the space in between you making meaning and me making meaning.” The New Media Literacies project has created video “exemplars” of topics such as remixing and DJ culture for use in schools. ]]> Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/456 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/456 “If there is any kind of profession that’s gotten away with a kind of benign neglect of diversifying itself over the course of last 30 years, it’s architecture,” says Ted Landsmark. With one chart after another, he plots the dismal record of design schools, firms and professional associations in modifying their singularly white profiles.

Of the 100 thousand licensed architects in the U.S. today, 1,571 are African American and 186 of these are African American women. In 2003, a mere 40 Masters students graduated. And more than 1/3rd of these graduates obtained their degrees from an historically black college or university. The rest of the schools offering architecture educations have graduated a few score of African Americans, compared to thousands of white students. “If we were to triple the number of African Americans who graduated from programs over the next decade,” says Landsmark, “we would still only be up to 10%.”

Why are law and business much more diversified professions than architecture?, queries Landsmark. He cites one argument that “smart black guys won’t choose to become architects because they can’t make as much money as lawyers.” But compensation levels are just fine, he notes, and “if people of color are too smart to go into the field, what’s wrong with all the white men who do?” The economic side is bogus. Instead, Landsmark notes that most black architecture graduates of historically black colleges opt to avoid the abuse of working for a firm and taking a licensing exam when they can go directly to work for HUD, or the Army Corps of Engineers. Landsmark also cites the patronage and class system involved in obtaining private work, which “determines who can survive in a field.” White social networks deprive African Americans of start-up opportunities and access to markets. There’s also a noticeable absence of black role models, and African Americans’ own orientation toward “community based work that is not celebrated by publications, schools or awards.”

At a time when there is a greater global need for designers, and when architectural firms are eager to tap into new markets, the nation can’t continue to ignore the African-American talent pool. Among other solutions, Landsmark suggests increasing public awareness of architecture, targeting young people. This might mean scholarships, or putting card tables out in front of Home Depots in communities of color. Architecture firms should invest in their black associates -- growing their careers and increasing their visibility, and establish mentoring programs. Radical steps must be taken, he says, “or someone else will stand here and use the same slides” 10 years from now. ]]> Wed, 30 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/449 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/449 With wit and candor -- including some jabs at engineering school traditionalists --Yossi Sheffi questions the future value of the current MIT engineering education, and proposes an alternative.

In days past, engineers answered the call to invent gizmos, gadgets and complicated devices, but in our time, they must increasingly respond to challenges involving complex systems. “Process design is where many of tomorrows’ challenges lie,” says Sheffi. How to fashion a global supply chain, for instance, that consistently ensures items are available on time, on the shelf, at a low cost, a chain that is responsive to external demand and shocks –this is difficult, he says. But it is this kind of know-how that provides a competitive advantage. Walmart, says Sheffi, “didn’t come up with new exciting stuff but they dominate the market…through process, not product innovation.”

The kind of engineer who can succeed and lead in this global market -- one that is increasingly fed by graduates of schools in China and India, notes Sheffi – may no longer be the type educated at MIT. The Institute is top-rated, but is mired in an approach “fit for mid-20th century manufacturing-based society,” and is now “resting on past laurels.” Yet, why change, Sheffi ponders. “We are #1. Rah rah.” But look at MIT’s School of Engineering “among friends,” he suggests, and you must admit there’s “significant calcification, duplication and conservatism.” He finds multiple fluid mechanics and thermodynamics courses among the various departments. “How many courses have ‘control’ in their name? 228!” Students are a key barometer of this stodginess, says Sheffi. There’s been a 20% decline in engineering graduates in the last eight years.

So MIT must shift gears, and embrace two basic missions: continuing to produce world-class experts (geeks) – practicing engineers who design complicated systems – and generating world-class leaders (chiefs), who will deploy their technological expertise in the real-world. “My hypothesis is that the great leaders of the next century will have to have a technological background, because we’re going toward a technologically innovative society.” These leaders will be problem definers as much as problem solvers, and, says Sheffi, “either we or China will educate them.”

Sheffi suggests a School of Engineering-wide undergraduate program, where all the fundamentals courses are rethought and taught differently. This means sacrificing problem sets for case studies, and “learning how a subject fits into the grand scheme of things.” MIT should integrate humanities with engineering subjects, ensuring undergraduates understand business, ethics, legal language, environmental concerns, organization and process design. There should also be a formal leadership workshop, required time in a foreign culture and along the lines of the European Union, a five-year educational model. If MIT builds it, others will follow, assures Sheffi.

]]> Wed, 30 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/450 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/450 Wanted: Citizen-observers to document springtime arrivals and departures of common plants and animals. Richard Primack and Abraham Miller-Rushing hope to enlist your help in a project aimed at gathering data on the impact of climate change. In conversation with Museum audience members, they describe their work to date, and what they need from volunteers.

Signs of global warming aren’t turning up just at the polar ice caps. When daffodils bloom in January in New England, it’s clear the climate is off kilter more generally. Accurate data from specific regions on when flowers bloom, or when birds migrate to their breeding grounds, says Primack, will help scientists draw an accurate and detailed picture of how warming is altering local ecosystems.

Primack and Miller-Rushing have begun to pinpoint climate impact patterns in the Northeastern U.S., and they have some historical help: the journals of Henry David Thoreau, who observed when more than 600 species of plants flowered in Concord, MA. Thoreau’s diaries and tables help demonstrate not only a drastic loss of local plant species, but a wholesale shift in the flowering dates of surviving plants. For instance, the highbush blueberry blooms almost a month earlier than in Thoreau’s time. Primack and Miller-Rushing also came across a treasure trove of 19th-century cemetery photos, enabling stark contrasts with our own times: trees not yet in leaf on Memorial Day in the last century.

In Europe, where data’s been gathered for years, some insect-catching birds are in serious decline, as they migrate to their spring breeding grounds out of phase with their prey. Primack’s initial U.S. data reveals similar alterations. The blackpoll warbler, for instance, which migrates long distances, “has no idea what the temperatures are here,” and shows up too early from its wintering grounds.

Primack and Miller-Rushing have launched a program to gather data from locations across New England, from the mountains of New Hampshire to the cities. They encourage all keen-eyed naturalists to respond to their questionnaires, and to develop a seasonal awareness of, among other things, when ponds and lakes thaw, when butterflies first appear, and when peepers begin their spring chorus.

Follow this link to contribute diaries or photos to the research database.
]]> Wed, 11 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/438 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/438 James Duderstadt believes recent efforts to digitize scholarly journals, along with Google’s massive digital library enterprise, “could be as important as the Internet in changing the scaffolding for learning and scholarship in the world.” In this final panel of the iCampus series, Duderstadt asks his colleagues to take up the question of how to propagate or scale up successful initiatives in educational technology, so that they have a transformative impact on higher education.

Andrew Chien points to the evolution of retail e-commerce, with many merchants following trailblazers like Amazon, and some ultimately serving as “portals to enable small players to accelerate their reach and innovation.” Chien suggests that over time, “collaboration and competition will allow us to choose from a variety of interesting things.”

The Mellon Foundation believes that for technology to succeed, it must be developed collaboratively in the first place, says Chris Mackie. In an effort to “reduce the predilections of institutions to build silos and a balkanized world,” Mellon is talking to different institutions “about the concept of building an academic services bus environment to match enterprise services bus environments.”

Technology can be counted successful only if it “resonates in the marketplace,” says Irving Wladawsky-Berger. “What’s an example of exciting technology that people like?” he asks. “Highly visual interfaces—there are millions of people playing games.” Wladawsky-Berger says he’s “convinced that embracing highly interactive approaches in cyberinfrastructure and the Internet will revolutionize the way people interact with machines at all levels.” He also endorses engaging learners and teaching problem-solving skills through story-telling techniques.

In India and other developing nations, says Ashok S. Kolaskar, there are “many people living in the 17th century, with infrastructure very behind.” For large numbers of Indians who have no access to a decent education, technology is critical. Building an extensive broadband network, and providing something like OpenCourseWare could “bring up the bar,” and make the difference between a community college education and advanced higher education. Kolaskar also emphasizes teacher training, since the new “plug and play generation” knows more about technology than their elders.

Initiating a freewheeling exchange between panelists and such distinguished audience members as Chuck Vest and John Seely Brown, Duderstadt discusses lifelong secondary learning opportunities for all adults (assuming that increasing life spans will mean people lead productive careers into their 80s and 90s). Vest urges that with an aging workforce, “Somehow we must find ways of intelligently mixing generations on a large scale, so we’re learning from each other in a new and different way.” Chris Mackie says technologies could play a crucial role in establishing “cross generational models” of higher ed, supporting students from the earliest age, and helping mentor them via alumni networks when out of college. ]]> Wed, 11 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/439 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/439 “The great innovations are in front of us as a society,” believes Rich Templeton. This means glowing opportunities for young people entering the workforce, especially those pursuing science and engineering. “The world is getting technologically more sophisticated, and people who understand how this world works will be advantaged, no matter what their occupation: researcher, scientist, lawyer or salesperson.”

In the 130 years since Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, one billion land line phones have been installed. In the 20-year-history of the cell phone, three billion units have come into circulation around the globe. That number may go up to four billion soon. “I don’t know of any other product that two-thirds of the world’s population uses,” Templeton remarks. He views the explosion of consumer markets as an enormous incentive to entrepreneurs and others moving into the job market. He urges listeners to consider the emerging economies of China and India as a welcome change, not a threat. “We’ve got three billion additional consumers…who will drive the economy, overnight. We’ve never seen that type of transformation … in the history of the world.”

The convergence of electrical engineering and life sciences will create a robust area for product development. Templeton envisions such equipment as portable, low power, and low cost ultrasound machines, capable of operating in remote villages, or implantable devices to diagnose and monitor an individual’s health.

Templeton himself is a product of an engineering education, but to his college advisor’s chagrin, chose to head first into sales. It’s a choice he’s never regretted. “It wasn’t about making money, it was because I enjoyed it,” Templeton says. He’s found that a technical background immeasurably helped in his relations with customers. When students ask about choosing a career path, he advises, “Relax, do what you think you’ll have fun doing, and work on things you’re not familiar with, challenging stuff that scares you because you don’t have a background in it.” ]]> Mon, 02 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/435 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/435 In an informal conversation with an MIT Museum audience, Walter Bender describes the mission and progress of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) venture. The brainchild of Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab, this enterprise aims to put low-cost ($100 or less!) laptops into the hands of a billion plus children in the developing world. The mission is not merely to supply inexpensive technology, but to provide a multi-purpose teaching tool, Bender explains, with hardware and software aimed at enabling kids to explore the world and express themselves.

MIT is not a Johnny-come-lately to the area of technology and children. “We’ve been living and breathing this for 40 years,” says Bender. OLPC embraces the beliefs that we all learn and we all teach, and that we’re expressive and social, so the laptop is “designed with a low floor and no ceiling,” as Bender puts it. For instance, a child can access and play instruments, or record her voice. If inclined, a child can compose and record music sequences. Since the laptop functions as part of a local area network, even in the most remote places (by way of a crank-up power charger), children can even make music together. They “can be both consumers and creators of content,” Bender notes. “Real learning happens while they’re being expressive.”

In a map of the world displaying nations that have expressed interest in acquiring MIT’s laptops, pretty much every country is in color. In 2006, Libya signed up for 1.2 million laptops, one for every school-age child in the nation, giving OLPC an Arabic-speaking launch country.

A Cambridge city councilor asks Bender whether One Laptop per Child can bridge the digital divide in the U.S., where there are a lot of kids with no computers at home. Bender replies that while his laptop “is on a trajectory where it should be useful to any kid anywhere,” the immediate issues are supply and need: in the U.S., the average annual expense on education per child is around $7 thousand annually, and in developing countries, it’s at most $200-300 per year. “Where am I going to focus in the short term? It’s Guatemala, not here.” ]]> Tue, 27 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/433 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/433 While globalization poses critical challenges for the U.S. economy, Charles Vest believes that knowledge-sharing may serve as the best response to increasingly competitive times.

Vest sketches the increasingly dire situation of U.S. manufacturing, R&D and innovation, which are “migrating and morphing.” Between 2000 and 2002, the U.S. lost 400 thousand jobs in IT manufacturing, and during roughly the same period, foreign firms built 60 thousand manufacturing plants in China, Vest notes. In the U.S., agriculture and industry have given way to the service sector. This means, says Vest, that “a huge part of the population today is employed, and in the future, more, in providing services largely but not exclusively driven by information technology.”

But the U.S. science and engineering infrastructure, in contrast to other nations, is not keeping pace with these changes. Warns Vest, “People everywhere are smart and capable, and give them a chance and the education,” they’ll do at least as well as Americans have. China is already churning out far greater numbers of engineers than the U.S., and making them available to a global market at a far lower cost. The solution is to “strengthen the quality and nature of science and engineering education,” with a focus on technological proficiency, leadership, and international vision.

In practice, this means to Vest a new phase for the research university: creating a physical and/or virtual presence in other countries, alliances with overseas partners, and freely shared, digitally housed content -- what Vest calls “the emerging meta university.” With MIT’s own web-based Open Course Ware as a model, Vest prescribes increasingly accessible resources for scholarship and education, which will prove “strategically and fundamentally important to us, in the true spirit of education, democratization and empowerment.” Sharing underpins “innovation, cooperation and competition worldwide.” Vest envisions a “dynamically constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced.” ]]> Tue, 13 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/429 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/429 Innovators from some of the nation’s top tech schools demonstrate their methods for making science and engineering education more engaging, if not fun.

At Tufts, Irene Georgakoudi hands out Legos to a freshman class on optics and lasers. While conveying properties of light and principles of laser operation, she hopes to excite students about physics and engineering. Teams design and build instruments out of Legos, and conduct experiments, gathering and recording data. Georgakoudi says with some sophisticated add-ons like motors, light sensors and control modules, Legos can “enhance understanding of basic concepts, promote creative thinking, provide practical experience with building and controlling instruments and promote teamwork.”

Shekhar Garde of RPI aims to feed the minds of an even younger audience. His Molecularium, an animated musical film introduction to the world of molecules, targets K-4 children. If this country is falling short in producing scientific and technological talent, Garde believes, we must convince kids that “atoms and molecules are amazing and interesting, and that it’s cool to learn about them.” Instead of a planetarium experience, Garde and colleagues focused on expanding the minuscule – water molecules, carbon atoms – and telling a story about the transformation of matter with cartoon characters. He’s hoping to move to an even bigger medium, IMAX film, with foundation help.

From her research studying how long air traffic controllers need to adapt to new technologies, Amy Pritchett figured that introducing novel technologies and methods to her institute peers would not be instantaneous. While many instructors have already developed technologies suited to their particular curriculum, other faculty remain completely uninterested. In her own industrial engineering course, students use a website for asynchronous dialogue to review each other’s designs. Pritchett believes what’s needed in the classroom is “not new technology but work processes,” especially those designed around cognition. Only by demonstrating that new technologies are effective and reliable in the classroom, and by showing how to implement new applications, will faculty want to sign on.

At the University of Michigan, Peter Chen has come up with an introduction to computing systems that allows first year students “to experience the joys of engineering,” harnessing both enthusiasm and creativity. His Microprocessors and Music course demands that students conceive a product, then design, build, test and report on it. In the process of creating music machines, students pick up the basics of digital logic, computer architecture and embedded systems. Chen “plays” some of these products, which, he says, gave students a sense of pride and accomplishment. The course yielded overwhelmingly positive reviews among students as well as deep interest in pursuing computer engineering careers.

]]> Mon, 05 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/427 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/427 “Are we going to tinker on the edges of a system no longer operative or talk about how to design the supersonic jet of the conceptual economy’s high performance learning
enterprise?,” asks Deborah Wince-Smith, throwing down the gauntlet for fellow panelists. She describes our current education system as rooted in the 19th century, and failing to provide students with the tools to participate in a global, “conceptual economy.” Learning must engender innovation -- what Wince-Smith calls “I to the 5th power: the intersection of imagination, insight, ingenuity, invention and impact.”

At Tufts University, says Lawrence Bacow, “We imbed engineering in liberal arts,” generating interaction between arts and sciences students and engineering faculty and students. Among liberal arts students, this fuels both technological literacy and such an interest in engineering that there’s been a trend-reversing net migration from arts and sciences to engineering. “By not isolating arts and science students in an engineering ghetto, we’ve created a more literate engineer,” says Bacow.

Richard Lampman says Hewlett Packard looks to hire “a whole person who needs to be able to interact on a broader basis…who can be an entrepreneur, work in global cross-cultural teams.” For him, the, the principal consideration in education “is how to get students capable of doing more than just solving problems -- that’s table stakes. To go beyond that, they need a lot more.”

To find developers for Microsoft, Rick Rashid travels increasingly to India, China and Europe. He can’t meet the demand in the U.S. “for people who are mentally agile, can solve problems under pressure and can work with other people.” He’s witnessing an enormous drop off in relevant graduates nationwide, with a disproportionate loss of women and minorities. “If you step back broadly and look at engineering, you can be very concerned, but look just at my area, computer science, and it’s reasonable to start thinking about panicking,” says Rashid.

Vernon Ehlers says his role on the panel “is to represent the ignorant people of this country” -- not the children who know they want to be engineers, but the “passionless kids” who don’t get the basic principles of math and science. As someone who grew up in a town of 800 with no early college ambitions, Ehlers understands these kids. He says, “If we’re serious about meeting the manpower needs of the nation, we literally have to start with preschool.” He also advises “teaching teachers to be excited about math and science, so they can convey this to their kids.

Diane Jones didn’t know what a Ph.D. was until college. Getting a science education was a “pretty difficult” path for her, and she learned that her field was elitist. That’s one reason she counsels “looking for talent in new places,” like the community colleges where she’s taught. You’ll find smart kids there, she says, and it’s where to head “if you really want to go after women and minorities.” She also sees engineering, especially IT, as the way up for first generation students in this country. ]]> Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/419 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/419 In a digitally connected, rapidly evolving world, we must transcend the traditional Cartesian models of learning that prescribe “pouring knowledge into somebody’s head,” says John Seely Brown. We learn through our interactions with others and the world, he says, and there’s no more perfect medium for enabling this than an increasingly open and organized World Wide Web.

While the wired world may be flat, it now also features “spikes,” interactive communities organized around a wealth of subjects. For kids growing up in a digital world, these unique web resources are becoming central to popular culture, notes Brown. Now, educators must begin to incorporate the features of mash-ups and remixes in learning, to stimulate “creative tinkering and the play of imagination.”

With the avid participation of online users, the distinction between producers and consumers blurs. In the same way, says Brown, knowledge ‘production’ must flow more from ‘amateurs’ – the students, life-long learners, and professionals learning new skills. Brown describes amateur astronomers who observe the sky 24/7, supplementing the work of professionals in critical ways. A website devoted to Boccaccio’s Decameron welcomes both scholars and students, opening up the world of professional humanities research to all.

The challenge of 21st century education will be leveraging the abundant resources of the web – this very long tail of interests – into a “circle of knowledge-building and sharing.” Perhaps, Brown proposes, the formal curriculum of schools will encompass both a minimal core “that gets at the essence of critical thinking,” paired with “passion-based learning,” where kids connect to niche communities on the web, deeply exploring certain subjects. Brown envisions education becoming “an act of re-creation and productive inquiry,” that will form the basis for a new culture of learning. ]]> Wed, 13 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/409 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/409 Though two years departed from the MIT President’s office, Charles Vest has lost none of his zeal for issues of education and training. Says Vest, "I envy the next generation of engineering students. This is without question the most exciting period of human history in science, technology and engineering."

He cites exponential advances in knowledge, instrumentation, communication and computational capabilities, which have "created mind-boggling possibilities," cutting across traditional boundaries and blurring distinctions between science and engineering. At the same time, globalization is changing how engineers train and work, as well as how nation's resources are directed. "The entire nature of the innovation ecosystem and business enterprise is changing dramatically in ways we do not yet fully understand," says Vest. These dizzying changes require an accelerated commitment to engineering research and education, and compel research institutions simultaneously to advance the frontiers of fundamental science and technology, and to address the most important problems that face the world.

Vest perceives two key frontiers of engineering: the intersection of physical, life and information sciences -- so-called bio, nano, info-- "which offers stunning, unexplored possibilities;" and the macro world of energy, food, manufacturing, communications, which presents "daunting challenges of the future."

The kind of students Vest hopes will explore these new frontiers should reflect a diverse society, write and communicate well, think about ethics and social responsibility, conceive and operate systems of great complexity within a framework of sustainable development and be prepared to live and work as global citizens. It's a "tall order," admits Vest, but "there are men and women every day here who seem to be able to do all these things and more."

To prepare this new generation, engineering schools should focus on creating an environment that provides inspiration. In the long run, offering "exciting, creative adventures, rigorous, demanding and empowering milieus is more important than specifying details of the curriculum," says Vest. Students are "driven by passion, curiosity, engagement and dreams." Give them opportunities to discover and do – to participate in research teams, perform challenging work in industry, gain professional experience in other countries. Vest says, "We must ensure the best and brightest become engineers of 2020 and beyond. We can't afford to fail." ]]>