[edtech] The MIT OpenCourseWare Update -- Vol. 2, Issue 12
ocw-mail@MIT.EDU
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Wed Dec 22 10:48:55 EST 2004
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The MIT OpenCourseWare Update: December 2004
A Monthly E-mail Newsletter for Users
and Friends of MIT OpenCourseWare
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The December 2004 MIT OpenCourseWare Update Contains:
1. MIT Welcomes its New President
2. Digging Deeper: Course 21A.218J
3. A Frequently Asked Question
4. Comments
5. Newsletter Available Online at
<http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/AboutOCW/newsletter.htm>http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/AboutOCW/newsletter.htm
1. MIT Welcomes its New President
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Hundreds of MIT students, faculty and staff welcomed MIT's new
president, Dr. Susan Hockfield, at an MIT campus-wide celebration on
her first day on the job on December 6, 2004.
Hockfield, the former provost of Yale University and a noted
neuroscientist, had been elected on August 26 as the 16th president
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, succeeding Charles M.
Vest, who has led one of the world's foremost research universities
for the past 14 years.
In making the announcement, Dana G. Mead, Chairman of the MIT
Corporation who elected Hockfield, said, "As a strong advocate of the
vital role that science, technology, and the research university play
in the world, and with an exceptional record of achievement in
serving faculty and student interests, Dr. Hockfield is clearly the
best person to lead MIT in the years ahead. She brings to MIT an
outstanding record as teacher, scientist and inspirational leader
with a reputation for bringing out the best in all the people with
whom she works."
Hockfield joined the Yale faculty in 1985. She was promoted to full
professor in 1994 and quickly rose to the center of leadership at
Yale, first as Dean of Yale's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
(1998-2002), with oversight of over 70 graduate programs, and then as
Provost, the university's chief academic and administrative officer,
with oversight of the University's 12 schools. She earned her
bachelor's degree in biology from the University of Rochester in
1973, and earned a Ph.D. in anatomy and neuroscience from Georgetown
University School of Medicine in 1979.
"Around the world, MIT stands as an emblem of discovery and
innovation, produced through the scholarship of its outstanding
faculty, students and graduates," Hockfield said of her election to
the top post at MIT. "From my first conversations in the search
process, the Institute's central themes -- the pursuit of truth,
integrity, and the great meritocracy -- have resonated with my own
core values. This remarkable community's curiosity, intellectual
commitment and passionate determination to solve problems have
brought immeasurable benefit to humankind. It is an enormous honor
and a very great privilege to have been selected to join this effort
as MIT's next president."
She succeeds Vest, who had led MIT for the past 14 years and has been
a passionate advocate of the <http://ocw.mit.edu>MIT OpenCourseWare
(MIT OCW) project. <http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2003/cmv.html>Read
more about Charles M. Vest.
To read more about President Hockfield, check out the
<http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2004/president-articles.html>MIT News
Office's online archive of stories about her.
2. Digging Deeper: Course 21A.218J
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How can the individual be at once cause and consequence of society, a
unique agent of social action and also a social product? Why are some
people accepted and celebrated for their particular features while
other people and behaviors are considered deviant and stigmatized?
This month, we explore
<http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Anthropology/21A-218JIdentity-and-DifferenceFall2002/CourseHome/index.htm>Course
21A.218J: Identity and Difference, a course from the
<http://web.mit.edu/anthropology/>MIT Anthropology Program that
examines theoretical perspectives on human identity, focusing on
processes of creating categories of acceptable and deviant
identities. Professor Susan Silbey examines how identities are
formed, how they vary, the forms and possibilities of unique or
aggregate identities, how behaviors are labeled deviant, how people
enter deviant roles and worlds, responses to differences and
strategies of coping with these responses on the individual and group
level.
Throughout the course, Professor Silbey uses gender and sexuality as
an example of frequently stigmatized forms of identity. Thus, this
course is cross-listed in the
<http://web.mit.edu/womens-studies/www/>MIT Program in Women's
Studies.
This course features a set of 10
<http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Anthropology/21A-218JIdentity-and-DifferenceFall2002/LectureNotes/index.htm>Lecture
Notes, including #7, a lecture discussion about
"<http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Anthropology/21A-218JIdentity-and-DifferenceFall2002/887678E4-5686-480D-A76E-4FD247D54F2F/0/outline_702.pdf>Becoming
Deviant." The course also offers a rich
<http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Anthropology/21A-218JIdentity-and-DifferenceFall2002/Readings/index.htm>Reading
List, and a description of the
<http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Anthropology/21A-218JIdentity-and-DifferenceFall2002/Assignments/index.htm>Essay
Assignments that explore issues of human identity.
3. A Frequently Asked Question
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QUESTION: Why does MIT OCW rely on RealPlayer format for its all of
its video services?
ANSWER: It is true that almost all of the video available on the MIT
OCW site is in Real Media format, but we offer our users a link to
the <http://www.realnetworks.com/products/media_players.html>free,
downloadable version of RealPlayer on the
<http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/OCWHelp/technical-faq.htm>MIT OCW
Technical Requirements page.
We would consider -- and, in fact, actively encourage -- an open
source solution. However, in order to offer downloadable video
content in an open mpeg format, we would have to prepare all of our
video offerings encoded into two formats: Real Video and either mpeg2
or mpeg4, and this would be cost-prohibitive at this point in the MIT
OCW project.
When we decided at the launch of the MIT OCW project in 2002 to go
with the Real version, we were not aware of any open streaming
formats that were widely available, and just as importantly,
cross-platform compatible. As far as we know, the
<http://www.archive.org>Internet Archive has not made any "sector
leader suggestions" about open streaming options. If any of our users
have a suggestion, we appreciate any suggestions.
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<http://ocw.mit.edu>MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is a large-scale,
Web-based publishing initiative with the goal of providing free,
searchable access to MIT course materials for educators, students,
and individual learners around the world. These materials are offered
in a single, searchable structure spanning all of MIT's academic
disciplines, and include uniform metadata about the contents of the
individual subject sites.
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