SEMICIRCULAR rows of benches face the front of the room. A raised platform faces the benches. Anyone who has ever attended college will recognize the setting at once: a lecture hall.

Read More

New York Times, Education Life Supplement, January 16, 2005

A group of MIT engineers wanted to model the biological world. But, damn, some of nature’s designs were complicated! So they started rebuilding from the ground up – and gave birth to synthetic biology.

Read More

Wired Magazine, Issue 13.01 – January 2005

“The scene: the d’Arbeloff Studio Classroom at MIT, which instead of standard-issue academic seating features 13 round tables with chairs. At the tables, first-year students are looking on as lecturer Peter Dourmashkin, a physicist, puts up equations and diagrams on one of the room’s white boards… ”

Read More

MIT Spectrum, Winter 2004

Technology-enabled active learning merges lectures, cutting-edge visualizations and simulations, and hands-on desktop experiments to create a rich collaborative learning experience. Through stunning visualizations of complex physical phenomena and their related desktop experiments, Visualizing Physics: Technology-Enabled Active Learning at MIT follows the progression of the MIT undergraduate course, “Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism” (8.02) through three phases.

MIT Museum Presents an Insider’s View into MIT Course 8.02 – Renewing the MIT tradition of educational innovation

Original Text: http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/main/physics-spot.html (Link no longer active)

“Bill Gates gave the opening keynote Monday at Microsoft Research’s 6th annual Faculty Summit, and participated in an exclusive Q&A along with Rick Rashid, senior VP of Microsoft Research and Sailesh Chutani, director of Microsoft University Relations. Nearly 400 faculty invited from 135 higher education institutions in 20 countries met on Microsoft1s Redmond campus for the full event August 2-5…”

Read More

Syllabus Magazine, Wed., Aug. 18, 2004

“Over the last three years, the MIT Physics Department has been introducing major changes in the way that Mechanics I, 8.01, and Electromagnetism I, 8.02, are taught. These cases are the result of the TEAL (Technology Enhanced Active Learning) Project…”

Forum on Education of the American Physical Society, Spring 2004 (PAGE 4)

Read More (Page 4)
Original Link: http://icampus.mit.edu/news/Carticles/Csp04newsletter-final.pdf (No longer active)

“Since publication of the AAAS 1989 report “Science for all Americans” (1), commissions, panels, and working groups have agreed that reform in science education should be founded on “scientific teaching,” in which teaching is approached with the same rigor as science at its best (2). Scientific teaching involves active learning strategies to engage students in the process of science and teaching methods that have been systematically tested and shown to reach diverse students (3)…”‘

Science Magazine (Policy Forum, Education), April 23, 2004

Read More

By Robert Weisman, Globe Staff, 3/22/2004

Microsoft Research hasn’t located any of its cutting-edge labs in the Boston area. But when Rick Rashid spent a couple of days here last week, he was visiting the closest thing to a Microsoft lab on the East Coast: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

Rashid, senior vice president for research at Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, Wash., dropped in at MIT’s iCampus program, funded with a $25 million grant from Microsoft. The grant underwrites dozens of faculty- and student-run research projects, from designing robots on Microsoft-powered Tablet computers to controlling engineering lab equipment remotely with the company’s Web services applications.

ICampus is Microsoft’s largest single engagement with a research university and one of the most ambitious corporate investments in academic research anywhere.

”It was a confluence of their [MIT’s] interests and our interests,” Rashid said in an interview last week.

But the five-year program, and similar ones sponsored by Microsoft and other corporations, have drawn criticism from some who worry that business interests are encroaching on the academic world.

”The commercial culture has been intruding on academia and eroding its mission,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, a public interest group. ”In order for a university to maintain its integrity, it can’t be a service appendage of a corporation.”

Officials at Microsoft and MIT describe the program as an alliance between the company and the university. MIT deploys Microsoft’s information technology tools, and its money, to redesign how it teaches physics, computer science, and aeronautical engineering. A full-time representative of the Microsoft Research division is based in Cambridge and collaborates with university researchers on software applications, enabling remote classrooms, recorded lectures, and other technologies that can be shared with universities across the country or abroad. Although the company has the option of applying to license the technology, Rashid denied that it is the program’s purpose.

”We’re not trying to make a business out of this,” he said. ”We’re trying to work with universities more productively.”

MIT’s iCampus director Hal Abelson, a computer science professor, said the program has enabled the institute to ”make our engineering resources available around the world” through links to students at universities in Singapore, Sweden, and the United Kingdom — some of whom have used computer controls to do experiments on MIT’s laboratory equipment.

In another initiative at MIT, professors have replaced the traditional lecture with an innovative teaching model in which shorter talks are accompanied by students doing interactive simulation experiments. ”It looks like a whole bunch of seven-person groups rather than a large amphitheater full of students,” Abelson said.

The iCampus directors have allocated about $1.2 million over the past three years to student-proposed projects. In one, students are working to outfit boats with global positioning systems so they can be tracked on laptops during the Head of the Charles regatta next fall.

Rashid, a former computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said Microsoft devotes about 15 percent of its basic research budget to working with universities. It has separate programs with Carnegie Mellon, Stanford University, Cornell University, and other schools. Microsoft also sponsors about 25 graduate student fellowships, and last summer hosted 175 PhD candidates as interns at its Redmond research labs, which employ about 700 full-time researchers.

The labs have been founts of research for technologies, ranging from digital media players to Tablet computers to ”smart” wrist watches, that eventually become Microsoft products. Rashid said his research teams now are working on storage, search, and graphics technologies, and on software analysis programming tools that will represent the next generation of technology advances.

”My job is to make sure that Microsoft is still around in 10 years,” he said.

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.

“Physics students usually can’t see the forces between matter that they calculate during homework assignments. But in 1993, two computer scientists devised a Java applet (PDF) to make energy fields not only visible, but really rad-looking. Each year, John Belcher at MIT holds the “Weird Fields” contest among his physics students to see who can use the program to create the most aesthetically pleasing image by writing simple formulas for electromagnetism…”

Read More

Wired Magazine, March 17, 2004

LAMP Project Still Offline, Searching for Music that can be Broadcasted

By Ray C. He

STAFF REPORTER

The five 2003 MIT-Microsoft iCampus partnership projects, each given $30,000 of support, concluded its year of funding with positive results.

Four out of the five projects have or soon will become available to the public. The Library Access to Music Project was temporarily useable, but was suspended due to technical difficulties.

Projects report success

The iLabNotebook project to replace notebooks with PC tablets in a laboratory working with bioinstrumentation has attracted industry interest, according to Patrick A. Anquetil G, who proposed iLabNoteBook.

Cyclescore, which provides a game-like interface on exercise bikes, is ready for an April launch in the Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center after undergoing tests and interface design in the Media Lab, said principle investigator Joseph Heitzeberg G.

The iQuarium team installed their display with a completed program code, although their final product did not correspond with all of their initial goals as outlined in the Jan. 15, 2003 issue of The Tech [“Interactive Workout, Aquarium Funded by iCampus”].

The Distributed Collaboration System for the Mars Gravity Biosatellite project found software that allowed the team members to communicate, have a shared document system, and transfer files among MIT, the University of Washington, and the University of Queensland in Australia, said Paul D. Wooster ’03, program manager of the Mars Gravity Biosatellite program.

LAMP continues to face difficulty in finding a legal source for its music files following its precautionary shutdown after the discovery that its music supplier, Loudeye, did not actually have the right to sell them the music they provided.

Tablet PCs replace real notebooks

The idea of iLabNotebook came from a need to have easily accessible notes, information that can be shared among many researchers, and better data acquisition and management, Anquetil said.

“We started about March of 2003 and it’s been running for a year now,” he said.

The six tablet PCs rotated among several researchers. “We had about 12 people who used it within nine months,” he said. “That included not only PhD students, but post-docs, [Director of the BioInstrumentation Laboratory] Ian Hunter, undergraduates, as well as UROPs,” he said.

“It’s a neat and efficient way to document experiments,” he said.

“We just connect the tablet PCs to our instruments and import all this data directly into the laboratory notebook, which saves time, hassle, and you have it right there,” he said.

“One time, a faculty member we wanted to collaborate with was in Japan,” he said. “Instead of panicking and getting all my papers together, I just sent him my entire notebook.”

Some researchers did not like the iLabNotebook because of low resolutions on the desktop and short battery lives. “You would try to write something on the page and you found that the resolution was so poor that you couldn’t get detail,” he said.

The team plans to continue using their iLabNotebooks and “share our resource with the community,” he said. “I’ve had people in the industry contact me about it,” he said.

Games added to exercise bikes

The mating of stationary bicycle and video game technologies is “getting ready to deploy at the Zesiger Gym,” said Doron Harlev G. “Right now, we have it set up in the Media Lab and we’re in the final stages of fine-tuning it.”

The team is currently discussing the exact details of the launch, including the final date, with the athletic department, which the team has “been working closely with, virtually from day one,” Harlev said. “They’ve been very, very supportive.”

“We’re planning on getting at least two bikes,” Heitzeberg said.

The system will allow for user input in future improvements to the system. “It gives them immediate feedback about how effective their workout was and it’ll give us immediate feedback as to how they thought the game experience was,” Heitzeberg said.

The athletic department will take over project maintenance after the launch. “We’re working with [Z-Center General Manager Tim Moore] to make sure the people in the gym are trained to use it,” Heitzenberg said.

Fish vortices appear in Building 5

iQuarium project team members Audrey M. Roy ’05, Katheryn S. Wasserman ’04, and Aaron M. Sokoloski ’05 installed their display kiosk in Building 5’s Hart Nautical Gallery in a ceremony on Feb. 6 along with iCampus project managers Paul Oka and Rebecca G. Bisbee.

iQuarium teaches hydrodynamics by displaying the vortices created in moving water by swimming fish. The simulation displays data gathered in previous Course XIII projects.

The finished project features a trackball that can be used to rotate around the display, buttons to control zoom, information displays, and choose between two kinds of fish, the Blue Fin Tuna or the Giant Danube.

The kiosk comprises a large flat-panel plasma display, a Web camera to detect the presence of a person, a trackball and button, a computer for generating the graphics, and another computer for performing calculations, Sokoloski said. Most of the display came together within two weeks of the launch, he said.

The project was originally “intended for the visitors and students passing through the Infinite Corridor,” said the article.

The project was relocated to the Hart Gallery, which is a part of the MIT Museum located in Course XIII’s departmental space, because of architectural issues and context, according to Kurt C. Hasselbalch, curator of the Hart Nautical Gallery.

“We decided to have our iQuarium here instead of the corridor because we had no idea how to mount things in a perfectly secure way,” Roy said.

The source code for iQuarium and other iCampus projects is available to the public as a precondition for iCampus funding from Microsoft, Heitzeberg said.

DCS helps communication

The DCS component of the Mars Gravity Project was completed, Wooster said.

The project, originally proposed by James K. Whiting G, Audrey M. Schaffer ’05, and Ryan A. Damico ‘05, explored various file management and real-time communication solutions.

Most of the components are now in place. “We have tools now that make it much easier to transfer files, communicate, and cooperate in real time,” he said.

“We’ve been using more audio conferencing with Australia to decrease the cost of telephone [calls],” Wooster said. “One of the big features is the Microsoft Portal software, which is a document management system,” he said. “It allows us to post and edit documents through a web interface. It works directly with Microsoft Windows.”

“In terms of real time communications, what we started using is Microsoft Office Live,” Wooster said. “It allows whiteboarding and application sharing, which is very useful when you’re drawing a diagram or something and you want someone to be able to see what you’re doing.”

LAMP needs source of music

LAMP has been struggling to find a supplier to provide music so it can resume its service.

At this point, it is not clear when the service can resume, Mandel said.

“We have the rights to broadcast the music” from the music companies, he said, but have not been able to purchase music that can be legally broadcasted.

Since LAMP is a two-year iCampus project, it has a total of $60,000 of funding. Mandel said that they will retain this funding with no deadline for completion.

“We spent about $10,000 on cable broadcast equipment, but we didn’t spend any on music,” Mandel said.

---

This story was published on Tuesday, February 17, 2004.
Volume 124, Number 5