By MIT OpenCourseWare

When Professor Haynes Miller conducts office hours for his undergraduate course in differential equations, the room usually resembles a college sit-in, filled with twenty or more students settled across the floor and quietly doing their homework. “Inevitably,” he relates, “a few groups self-organize to start working out problems together on the chalkboard.”

Miller is soft-spoken, and a strong believer in allowing his students to work through challenges unassisted, so he often silently observes their progress from his desk. “Of course, they keep looking back at me for approval, trying to judge how they’re doing,” he chuckles. “One day, one of my students drew a hyperbola on the board after solving a tough equation, which showed the relationship between my face and their mastery of the problem. My expression moves from smiling amusement at their struggles—learning is underway!—to a calm kind of serenity when they finally get the answer.”

The dry, academic wit behind Miller’s story conveys some of the depth and warmth that he brings to a domain that is traditionally considered quite chilly. “The Hollywood perception of mathematics is that it’s very cold and austere. But it’s really one of the most human of all sciences. Mathematics just wouldn’t exist without people, and most of its progress has only occurred through human collaboration. Take chemistry and biology—you could reasonably say that they would exist whether humans studied them or not. But mathematics, because it’s purely conceptual, depends entirely on the thought of human beings.”

“The Hollywood perception of mathematics is that it’s very cold and austere. But it’s really one of the most human of all sciences. Mathematics just wouldn’t exist without people, and most of its progress has only occurred through human collaboration.”

Such a philosophical defense of mathematics makes perfect sense coming from the son of an English professor who’s currently wending his way through Shakespeare’s histories (he’s on Henry IV, Pt. 2) and is an avid birdwatcher (the elusive Connecticut Warbler is on the top of his list). His love for teaching has won him the respect of both colleagues and students: Miller has served as Associate Department Head of MIT’s Department of Mathematics, and in 2005 he received the prestigious appointment of MacVicar Faculty Fellow for his “exemplary and sustained contributions to teaching.”

“I Guess I Feel Lucky”

Growing up in Port Washington, New York, Miller showed an early interest in both math and science, and fondly recalls several NSF-funded programs that allowed him to visit both Columbia University and Notre Dame to study advanced mathematics while still in high school. Upon arriving at Harvard as an undergraduate, he still felt undecided about his major until he fell into the orbit of Raoul Bott, a legendary mathematics professor whose work profoundly changed the landscape of geometry and topology. Later, while earning his doctorate at Princeton, he studied under another mathematics luminary, John Moore. While Moore ran a highly influential seminar that attracted many of the brightest students in his generation, Miller remembers that “a lot of really exciting topology work was also going on at MIT under people like Dan Quillen. There was one postdoc at Princeton who came from MIT, and he brought some truly fascinating ideas along with him.”

Miller spent a decade teaching at the University of Washington and Notre Dame before being invited to join MIT as a professor in 1986. His elegant 1984 proof for the Sullivan Conjecture undoubtedly played a major role in that decision. For those of us who have not yet earned our Ph.D. in algebraic topology, Miller describes its relevance: “Traditional topology exists in higher dimensions, where things get more complicated and diverse. Algebra becomes a bookkeeping device to keep track of all the space in those different dimensions. What the Sullivan Conjecture proved is that at these higher dimensions there are some classes of space that cannot be compared, because they are too radically different.”

Although his proof opened up entirely new fields of mathematical research, Miller views his work with characteristic modesty. “I guess I feel lucky that this proof was useful to other people. For me, I think Andrew Wiles (who solved Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1995) probably said it best. He said that when you’re solving a complex problem, you end up stumbling around a room in the dark for a long while, maybe months, until you find a light switch that illuminates the entire room all at once. That’s the real thrill—that emotional sense of breakthrough. But to be honest, there are new wings to this mansion opening up all the time. The rate of advance is pretty constant.”

A Dedication to Teaching

Despite his achievements, Miller clearly prefers to focus on teaching. He speaks with admiration for both the graduate and undergraduate students he instructs each year. “One of the first things I noticed when I came to MIT was the quality of the students,” he remarks, “I was lucky enough at the time to work with a professor named Frank Peterson, who ran a seminar here, and he handed the keys over to me, which meant that I had all the fun of talking with the students, with none of the responsibility.”

Miller’s dedication to teaching—while advancing the field of mathematics at MIT and beyond—comes through best in one of his recent endeavors. In collaboration with Karen Willcox from the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics, he developed a tool called Crosslinks, that is designed to promote deeper cross-domain awareness of how certain concepts are taught and used in different departments. “As professors,” he explains, “we don’t always do a good job stepping outside our bubbles, to make sure that we are teaching in a way that helps students apply that knowledge to other domains, so I’ve been working with other faculty to find new ways to bridge that gap.”

Miller’s students have bestowed their own dubious recognition upon him in typical MIT fashion. He was a recent runner-up for the annual “Big Screw” award, which usually goes to professors whose courses are both popular and outrageously difficult. Miller, of course, is savvy enough to play right along. He shakes the jar of wood screws that he received as a consolation prize with mock astonishment: “The winner gets a giant, four-foot-long, aluminum, left-handed wood screw, but all I get are these defective screws,” he pauses deadpan, “—they’re all right-handed!”

Jokes aside, Miller knows that the jar symbolizes his students’ respect for his dedication to teaching. Indeed, it would be hard to find a better proponent of the joys of mathematics: “One of the true pleasures of teaching is helping students achieve small breakthroughs in their thinking. By creating mathematical exercises, you stimulate that kind of experience for them, and you start to open their eyes to the possibilities for new discoveries in mathematics. That’s precisely why I’m such a big fan of OCW as well, because it allows you to expand the experience to an even broader audience.”

OCW Courses Taught by Prof. Haynes Miller

• 18.03SC Differential Equations
  
• 18.01SC Single Variable Calculus
• 18.03 Differential Equations
• 18.821 Project Laboratory in Mathematics
• 18.915 Graduate Topology Seminar: Kan Seminar
• 18.905 Algebraic Topology

By MIT OpenCourseWare

Decades before personal computing went mainstream, years before Bill Gates had even programmed his first game of Tic-tac-toe, Stuart Madnick began dabbling in what would become a lifetime pursuit. He came across his first computer in the early 60’s during a field trip with his school science club and was hooked.

But if it was truly love at first sight, Madnick wryly remarks, it took a few years for the romance to really blossom: “My father was a shoe cutter, and always made it clear that I needed to learn a real trade. This was long before ‘computer science’ could be considered an academic discipline—it felt more like a hobby or a game. In the end, my compromise was to study electrical engineering. I figured that I could always fall back onto fixing toasters.”

Growing up in a working-class family from Worcester, Massachusetts, Madnick and his brothers learned from an early age that hard work and a good education were the path to success. His personal interests lay mainly in math, science … and magic. A few of his notable childhood accomplishments included building a Van de Graaff generator—a device that accumulates an electrostatic charge and discharges it in the form of a miniature lightning bolt—and constructing a box that was strategically lined with mirrors, allowing the talented magician to make anyone’s head seem to disappear and reappear. He remembers always being a diligent student: “At the end of every school year, I would take out a pile of books from the library, and sit on the lawn in our backyard reading about anti-neutrinos. I’m pretty sure that’s not typical summertime behavior.”

A Career in Computing

It’s little surprise, then, that Madnick was admitted to MIT. At first his aspiration was to become a nuclear engineer, but he was soon lured into computing, which proved to be a lucrative choice for the young student: “By 1964, computers were becoming more popular at MIT, but people who knew anything about them were pretty scant. That meant that I had a lot of opportunities. I think that at one point or another, I must have worked for almost every department at MIT, helping them with some sort of computing challenge.”

Madnick has managed to stay far ahead of the computing curve for his entire tenure at MIT. Not only did he create or co-found several high-tech companies that remain major actors in the IT field, but he’s written over 250 highly influential articles or books. His 1974 textbook, Operating Systems, was a seminal reference book for decades, and the “Little Man Computer” or LMC model that he invented to teach beginning students the inner workings of a computer’s central processing unit (CPU) remains a touchstone for any computer science course. “It’s easy to win a race,” he offers with characteristic modesty, “when there’s no one else in it. I’ve just been lucky to have been in the right place at the right time.”

A Balance Between Awe and Skepticism

The broad perspective that Madnick has won over a lifetime in information technology is a welcome contrast to some of the breathless hyperbole that we read in today’s media. “There’s often a perception that nothing of real interest in technology existed more than five years ago, probably no more than five months ago,” he explains, “But many of today’s breakthroughs are actually re-implementations of old ideas. Cloud computing and software-as-a-service is a form of the time-sharing work we did in the 60’s. Large-scale distributed databases are very similar to the parallel processing computers we were looking at in the 80’s.”

But Madnick is careful not to allow himself to sound too much like, as he puts it, an “old curmudgeon.” The computer industry has clearly undergone massive transformation through steep drops in pricing. “I don’t know if I could have quite envisioned how fast and how far things have gone. In 1970, memory cost a dollar a byte. That means that in 1970, a megabyte cost 1 million dollars. Computers were the size of laundry machines. To have come this far is kind of mind boggling.”

His courses strike a careful, pragmatic balance between awe and skepticism. He tries to offer a viewpoint that places as much emphasis on computing’s past as its future. “We have realized a vision of the world that only a generation ago was pure science fiction. A world—just as Isaac Asimov imagined it—where all knowledge is at our fingertips. But now we hear CEOs and government agencies complain about having more and more information that they know less and less about, because of data quality issues. Sometimes I like to quote Genesis chapter 11, the Tower of Babel. This problem has been around for a long time, and it’s a lot harder to fix than people imagine.”

“I don’t know if I could have quite envisioned how fast and how far things have gone. In 1970, memory cost a dollar a byte. That means that in 1970, a megabyte cost 1 million dollars.”

“Insanity Helps”

Maybe one of the reason Madnick can maintain such a balanced perspective is thanks to one of his pursuits outside of teaching—something very un-futuristic. He and his wife own a hotel and restaurant in a restored medieval castle, called Langley Castle, in the English countryside near Newcastle.

What possessed him? “Insanity helps,” he laughs. In the 80’s, Madnick sold an interest in a company that he had founded, and was looking for an investment. A friend showed him an article about a 14th-century castle that was up for sale in England. At the time, the British pound had hit parity with the dollar. On impulse, he bought the castle, even without a clear plan for what to do with it. He briefly entertained a variety of business ideas, including founding a school of falconry catering to Middle Eastern sheikhs, but finally settled on a hotel and restaurant.

For Madnick, much of the fun has been learning all about the castle’s remarkable past, and he’s just as happy to talk about its history as anything computer-related. “I love to learn new things. I’m a big fan of continuous learning. That’s what’s so wonderful about OCW, and why I’m such a big supporter of the OCW mission. Through self-learning, I’ve transformed myself several times over the decades. The things I’m doing now are very different from what I did 10, 20, 40 years ago. OCW opens this possibility to everyone.”

OCW Courses Taught by Prof. Stuart Madnick

• 15.565J Integrating eSystems & Global Information Systems
• 17.447 Cyberpolitics in International Relations: Theory, Methods, Policy

• Black Matters: Introduction to Black Studies (Linguistics and Philosophy)
  • Description: Interdisciplinary survey of people of African descent that draws on the overlapping approaches of history, literature, anthropology, legal studies, media studies, performance, linguistics, and creative writing. This course connects the experiences of African-Americans and of other American minorities, focusing on social, political, and cultural histories, and on linguistic patterns.
• Race, Ethnicity, and American Politics (Political Science)
  • Description: This course explores the role of race and ethnicity in modern American politics. It focuses on social science approaches to measuring the effects of race, both at the individual level and more broadly. Topics include race and representation, measurement of racial and ethnic identities, voting rights and electoral districting, protest and other forms of political participation, and the meaning and measurement of racial attitudes.
• Race, Crime, and Citizenship in American Law (History)
  • Description: This seminar looks at key issues in the historical development and current state of modern American criminal justice, with an emphasis on its relationship to citizenship, nationhood, and race/ethnicity. We begin with a range of perspectives on the rise of what is often called “mass incarceration”: how did our current system of criminal punishment take shape, and what role did race play in that process? Part Two takes up a series of case studies, including racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty, enforcement of the drug laws, and the regulation of police investigations. The third and final part of the seminar looks at national security policing: the development of a constitutional law governing the intersection of ethnicity, religion, and counter-terrorism, and the impact of counter-terrorism policy on domestic police practices.
• Topics in Social Theory and Practice: Race and Racism (Linguistics and Philosophy)
  • Description: Courses in the Topics in Social Theory and Practice series feature in-depth considerations of such topics with reflections on their implications for social change. The topic for this course is race and racism. We will consider a variety of arguments for and against the biological and / or social “reality” of race—taking into account purported races other than those defined by the black / white binary and the intersection of race with other social categories. We will then consider a number of accounts of racism, contemporary manifestations of racism, and potential counter-measures.
• Writing About Race (Department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing)
  • Description: Does race still matter, as Cornel West proclaimed in his 1994 book of that title, or do we now live, as others maintain, in a post-racial society? The very notion of what constitutes race remains a complex and evolving question in cultural terms. In this course we will engage this question head-on, reading and writing about issues involving the construction of race and racial identity as reflected from a number of vantage points and via a rich array of voices and genres. Readings will include literary works by such writers as Toni Morrison, Junot Diaz, and Sherman Alexie, as well as perspectives on film and popular culture from figures such as Malcolm Gladwell and Touré.

Additional resources are available and searchable by topic, department, and/or MIT course number on the MIT OpenCourseWare website.

(Photos of Toni Morrison courtesy of Angela Radulescu on Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA. Photo of Malcolm X is in public domain, from the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, NYWT&S Collection, LC-USZC2-5832. Photo of protester with flag courtesy of UNARMED CIVILIAN on flickr. License CC BY-NC-SA. Photo of Ferguson sign courtesy of Light Brigading on flickr. License CC BY-NC. Photo of cardboard sign courtesy of PictureNewYorkLG on flickr. License CC BY-NC-SA.)

We’re saddened to hear of the death of our friend Herb Gross, who passed away on May 27th at the age of 91.

Herb, whom we profiled on this blog in a post on the occasion of his 90th birthday last year, touched the lives of countless students worldwide through his series of videos on single variable calculus, multivariable calculus, and complex variables, differential equations, and linear algebra, first recorded about fifty years ago but still among the most popular resources on MIT OpenCourseWare and on OCW’s YouTube channel.

As news of Herb’s death has spread, those who benefited from his teaching have been quick to share their remembrances and tributes. We would like to share a sampling of the comments we received in response to the post on our YouTube channel announcing his death:

“His lectures turned my fear of math into love.”

“He was a delight to watch.”

“A wonderful teacher who made calculus look effortlessly simple.”

“The enthusiasm, dedication and depth with which he discussed mathematics was just unparalleled….He was one of those teachers who reflected contagious joy in the process of teaching.”

“A truly great teacher. Able to ground the applied in the abstract – and able to draw straight lines and curves freehand. Able to insert wisdom seamlessly into practical instruction.”

“He was a great educator and great human being.”

These students and self-learners put the case more eloquently than we could hope to do ourselves. In losing Herb Gross, we have all lost a great treasure. But let us give Herb himself the last word. In an email to an OCW staffer a year or two before his death, Herb gave voice to a sentiment that he expressed often in his later years, as he reflected on his mortality and on his legacy as a math teacher:

“It gives me a great feeling to know that lectures I gave 50 years ago are still helping others learn; and because the Herb Gross in the videos will remain forever young, he will continue to help others even when this Herb Gross is no longer here.”

We couldn’t agree more. We’re deeply grateful for having known Herb Gross, and grateful too for being able to provide a platform through which his inspired teaching can go on indefinitely.

By MIT OpenCourseWare

It’s no exaggeration to say that Eric Klopfer has been at the forefront of bringing technology into the classroom since he was in grade school. Instead of writing a standard book report for his English teacher, he recalls, he dragged him down to the school’s very modest computer lab—consisting of a few Commodore 64’s and an Apple IIe in the corner—and proceeded to demonstrate a game that he had programmed that offered a series of alternate endings to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. “I’m pretty sure,” he laughs, “that was the first book report he had ever received on a computer.”

Klopfer’s enthusiasm for computer gaming traces back to the very start of the personal computer revolution, when his father, a high school math teacher, would bring home one of the school’s Commodore Pet computers from school over holidays, which allowed Eric to start experimenting with programming in BASIC at a very young age. When it was time to get the family’s first home computer, Eric had already done all the market research, and recommended an Apple II Plus.

He and his school friends traded software programs like baseball cards—he loved the first generation of interactive text games like “Colossal Cave Adventure” and “Zork”—and they inspired each other to learn even more about programming. “During those early years,” he muses, “I think it was our common interest in computing that probably influenced me much more than any particular mentor.”

Klopfer continued to use technology as a tool throughout his educational career. While pursuing his doctorate in zoology at the University of Wisconsin, he designed a simulation based on the “prisoner’s dilemma,” which allowed him to better understand and demonstrate the evolutionary consequences of cooperation among biological communities.

A Shift in the Paradigm of Learning

Today, Klopfer is at the center of an exciting confluence of technology, gaming, and education. He is the director of MIT’s Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade and the founder or co-founder of several innovative educational technology ventures, and his work has attracted major investments from the Gates Foundation and Google. Klopfer describes how technology and gaming fit into his vision for a fundamental shift in the paradigm of 21^st-century learning. “Playing computer games gets a bad rap because so much of it is designed for passive consumption,” he says, “but when games are putting people in challenging situations, and really promoting higher-order thinking skills, they can be incredibly useful.”

He cites immersive, highly complex games like Myst as a key influence on how he approaches game design even today: “When games are well designed, they keep pushing people to the edge of their expertise, so they can fail safely, then move on.”

Several of the games that Klopfer and his team at The Education Arcade have created perfectly illustrate his point. In The Radix Endeavor, a multiplayer online game for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) learning, players battle a villain who’s trying to monopolize all scientific knowledge on a strange world. By solving complex problems in biology and mathematics, the players test their skills in advanced concepts and unlock the secrets of this world. Another augmented reality game actually took place within the Boston Museum of Science, where middle school students were given smartphones and asked to zip through the museum collecting digital clues for a high-tech whodunit. “These games create situations where children are asked to make interesting decisions and understand their consequences,” states Klopfer. “We’re using the unique properties of different technologies to tap into existing problems and add new layers of information to get people more engaged.”

A third project, called App Inventor, which Klopfer co-directs with MIT luminaries Hal Abelson and Mitch Resnick, is founded on the notion that teachers and students should be able to create their own apps and adapt them to specific real-world situations. “We’re going to see a shift away from very passive forms of learning, where students are the consumers, into a situation where teachers and students are active producers and creating things. The democratization of programming is going to be a huge part of that shift. People may be making small apps that are only useful to a small number of people—maybe only for that semester or that class—but it will have a very powerful impact.”

“We’re going to see a shift away from very passive forms of learning, where students are the consumers, into a situation where teachers and students are active producers and creating things.”

What Online Resources Do Learners Actually Need?

On the hot topic of MOOCs (massively open online courses), Klopfer is a discerning supporter who expects that the technology strategies for these courses will continue to evolve. He’s skeptical, for example, of over-reliance on video lectures, which are difficult to scan for information, pointing out that pedagogical studies on the success of Khan Academy, the Gates Foundation-backed educational website, show the majority of learner traffic using the site’s problem sets, not the tutorials. Neither does he think that discussion boards are an adequate substitute for the kind of open interaction that happens in the classroom.

He concludes that despite the MOOC hyperbole, schools and universities are not going away anytime soon. What actually happens in the classroom, however, is very likely to change: “As we start more and more to ‘flip’ the classroom model, with students consuming lectures at home, and doing their active learning in class, the role of teachers will shift. In that sense, OCW has a very important role to fill. It provides exactly the type and depth of resources that are needed—problem sets, modular exercises, reading lists—for exploring ideas in the classroom.”

OCW Courses Taught by Professor Klopfer

• 11.124 Introduction to Education: Looking Forward and Looking Back on Education
• 11.125 Introduction to Education: Understanding and Evaluating Education
• 11.127J Computer Games and Simulations for Investigation and Education

How a self-described “Navy brat” and “geek” grew up to become a renowned and innovative music historian.

By MIT OpenCourseWare

Michael Cuthbert, MIT Associate Professor of Music, already has a long list of academic honors to his name, but his talent for creatively combining his two greatest interests—music and computers—may be his most impressive accomplishment. “As a child, my two instruments were a clarinet and a Commodore 64 computer,” he says. “The geek in me has always been on the lookout for new ways to connect them.”

He’s managed to bring both together with remarkable results through his groundbreaking research into 14th- and 15th-century European music, powered by an open-source software package that he designed, called music21. This program—freely available and used by thousands—allows him to analyze the inner mechanics of music and spot historically important trends with an unprecedented depth, breadth, and speed. By allowing any musical historian to spot patterns across musical works that may span hundreds of years and millions of notes, Cuthbert’s music21 has made a substantial contribution to the field of quantitative musical research, which he simply calls “listening faster.”

Each summer over the past few years, Cuthbert has pored through various archives in Italy and Germany—like a high-tech musical sleuth—searching centuries-old documents for fragments of musical pieces. Whatever he finds on these old parchments are often half-erased or badly damaged, but even the smallest musical fragment becomes useful once transcribed into his database. “I might find only fourteen notes, but I can take that phrase, and compare it to all the other similar pieces from the same time period.”

Through his research, Cuthbert has discovered a number of common harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic patterns, and succeeded in shifting the historical perspective on what was formerly viewed as a fragmented musical period. “Often when you find a new sheet or piece of music, there’s usually something that’s somehow different about it. Without a computer database and an ability to compare this music to many others, you tend to see these pieces as somewhat of an exception. But with a computer you can see the larger connections. Something that you thought was new and unique was simply a new condition, a slightly different way of doing the same music.”

As he describes his musical research, Cuthbert conveys such enthusiasm that it’s hard to imagine he might have considered working in any other domain. That he’s an accomplished composer whose works have been performed by notable ensembles, as well as a talented musician, further underscores the point. Yet, surprisingly, Cuthbert grew up with a fairly modest level of musical exposure as a child. In fact, his entire academic career in music was something of a happy accident.

From Marching Band to Musicology

Cuthbert was raised as a self-described “Navy brat” just outside San Diego. His parents had a small record collection with mainly country music, and a single classical album of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Cuthbert picked up clarinet in elementary school and practiced it through his teen years, with a brief switch to tenor drums for a year in high school so he could hear himself above the din of the high school marching band. As he approached his senior year of high school, however, he realized that he wasn’t suited for becoming a professional clarinet performer. “I saw that there were people out there who were far better than me,” he explains, “I’ve managed to find lots of ways to use computers to make my work easier, but there are no shortcuts when it comes to performance. Spending 6 or 7 hours in the practice room every day wasn’t how I wanted to spend the next 10 years of my life. ”

Cuthbert also composed music during his high school years. “One of my music teachers was handing out a worksheet. She realized that the copier had cut off the bottom of the page, so that the last few lines of music were missing. She offhandedly said that we could finish the piece if we wanted—and I ended up handing in a few pages worth of music—far more than necessary,” he remembers, “But it just felt so magical to be able to create music on the page.”

After being accepted at Harvard University as an undergraduate, Cuthbert resolved to pursue what he considered practical studies. He considered economics, physics, or electrical engineering, but after a difficult first year whose only bright spot was a course in 19th-century chamber music, he decided that he’d rather flunk out studying something he loved than muddle through school feeling uninspired. Not surprisingly, once he immersed himself in musical studies, his grades bounced right back, and Cuthbert eventually graduated summa cum laude. “What I have always loved about studying music was knowing how open-ended it was,” he reflects on those years, “In most exams in any given science, you always knew there was a perfect score you could get. What I loved in music was that you could always do better. There were no real boundaries. If you want to learn more, you learn more.”

“What I have always loved about studying music was knowing how open-ended it was. In most exams in any given science, you always knew there was a perfect score you could get. What I loved in music was that you could always do better. There were no real boundaries. If you want to learn more, you learn more.”

Although pursuing his passion wherever it led him has defined Cuthbert’s success as an adult, he admits that he may have frustrated some of his teachers as a young student. “I always managed to get good grades, but I’m sure that I infuriated a few teachers along the way,” he muses, “I would sometimes get caught up in a specific topic instead of following the lesson plan. If we spent a single class learning how to find the area of polygons, I would spend the next week obsessed with calculating the area of every possible shape—hexagons, octagons, decagons—and so on.”

Making Use of OCW

Lucky for him that he’s got OpenCourseWare to help feed his roving curiosity these days. “I think OCW is amazing. One of the reasons I really love it so much is that, because I studied art, there were a lot of topics that I missed in the sciences,” he says, “So OCW allows me to really brush up on those topics that interest me.”

Cuthbert goes on to explain how OCW has also served him professionally. “OCW is obviously great for self-learning. But what I think is sometimes overlooked is how valuable OCW can be for faculty who are creating their own courses,” he says, “It allows anyone get an inside look at how other professors are organizing and teaching their classes, in a way they might never have seen. That kind of exposure is invaluable.”

Having published some of his own MIT courses on OCW (21M.269 Studies in Western Music History: Quantitative and Computational Approaches to Music History, 21M.262 Modern Music: 1900-1960, and 21M.220 Early Music), Cuthbert openly solicits feedback from both students and professors. “I hope that people find my course useful—but I also hope they’ll tell me what they don’t like about it. At places like MIT—all over the world, really—there are people who are trying to actually change and evolve knowledge, not just report what’s already known. Disagreements and feedback are what creates diversity and new discoveries. That’s what really interests me most.”

This MIT professor is renowned for his contributions to computer science, but he views himself as a teacher first and foremost.

By MIT OpenCourseWare

Like many other universities in the late sixties, MIT was a hotbed of political activism. Rising tensions around the Vietnam War, coupled with controversial Defense Department research, culminated in hundreds of students occupying MIT’s Office of the President in January 1970. While that historic moment led to MIT’s eventual divestment from weapons research, it played an equally pivotal role in the career of a young mathematics student named Harold (“Hal”) Abelson: “I was a new graduate student, and figured that I’d never get another chance to go sit in the president’s office, so I wandered over, and there were a whole bunch of people from Students for a Democratic Society sitting around on the floor. One of them was somebody I’d gone to high school with. When I told him I was looking for a job, he suggested the Artificial Intelligence Lab.”

It would be hard to invent a more apt setting for the start of Professor Hal Abelson’s career in computer science. That one random bit of advice, delivered from the epicenter of a student occupation, not only anchored Abelson’s future in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab—it offers a fitting (if serendipitous) backdrop for his longstanding engagement with some of the most important issues at the crossroads of computing and society.

A Legendary Teaching Career

Abelson first picked up programming as a high school student during a summer job at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station. He coded in FORTRAN on an IBM 709 computer that ran on paper punch cards. As a mathematics undergrad at Princeton he continued to dabble in programming—jockeying with astrophysicists for valuable time on the mainframe—but ended up taking just one computer science course.

It was only while earning his Ph.D. in Algebraic Topology from MIT that he began to seriously study computer science, using applied mathematics to explore new ways of modeling distributed computing. He fell in with a variety of early computing initiatives at MIT, which eventually led to a teaching appointment in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department.

Today, Abelson’s teaching career is legendary. Together with Gerald Sussmann, he created Course 6.001, which would introduce several generations of MIT graduates to computer science and become the gold standard for its instruction. Over the more than thirty years since its publication, the course’s accompanying textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs has initiated tens of thousands of students into what Abelson earnestly calls the “magic” of programming.

Professor Abelson’s approach to teaching computer science was revolutionary at the time. He wanted to promote deeper thinking about the essence of programming—far beyond code, syntax, and computers. Because beneath all the technology, Abelson insists, computer programming is really an emerging form of “imperative knowledge”—a formal and systematic way of thinking about how to do things. We’re still on the cusp, Abelson asserts, of a much deeper evolution in how we organize thought.

In his introductory lecture to 6.001, he compares our current understanding of computer science to the humble origins of pure geometry, born from ancient Egyptians’ efforts to scientifically survey and manage the annual flooding of the Nile. What if all our computational thinking to date, Abelson asks, is just the most rudimentary form of far deeper principles?

Influential Innovations

Even aside from his having set the standard for teaching introductory computer science, Abelson’s contributions to the field are an embarrassment of riches. His academic work charts the furthest edges of computer science, through game-changing concepts like amorphous computing, while his pedagogical work keeps the field wide open to anyone interested. On the latter front, he directed the first implementation of Apple’s Logo, a computer language for children released in the early eighties.

He co-authored the book Turtle Geometry: The Computer as a Medium for Learning Mathematics, which has been hailed as “the first step in a revolutionary change in the entire teaching/learning process.” One of his most recent projects, in collaboration with Google, is the creation of MIT App Inventor, a web-based development system that makes it easy for anyone to create a mobile app.

Describing his motivations for the project, Abelson notes that “there just isn’t the thought that we can empower kids in this world of mobility in the same way that…we talked about empowering them in the world of personal computing. It’s actually a little bit scary to me, because what it’s saying is that the next generation gets introduced to this technology purely as a consumer product. There just isn’t the idea that my cell phone is something I might want to program.”

Shining through all of Abelson’s work is a constant concern with how technology should advance openness and empowerment. He is a vocal proponent of “computing values”—the philosophical ethics that get embedded within programming—and pushes his students to maintain the same level of social awareness and engagement when they design their own technology projects. “You need to know what’s worth making,” he says, “and that requires understanding about people, an understanding about society, and understanding about the context in which the program is going to be used. That’s what I try to teach when I teach programming.”

“You need to know what’s worth making, and that requires understanding about people.”

Principled Advocacy for Openness

Abelson’s principled advocacy has led to his founding both Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation, and playing a key role in the committee that launched MIT’s OpenCourseWare. He offers a thought-provoking perspective on its creation: “OpenCourseWare is a perfect example of how things can evolve in unexpected ways that sometimes surpass their original goals. It was born in the midst of the dot-com bubble, when everyone wanted to monetize educational content.

But after months of MIT analysis and consulting engagements, we realized that there were lots of negatives in trying to commercialize courses. We ended up with a very thick, very impressive binder—I didn’t know that binders that thick even existed—but it contained some fairly uninspiring conclusions. So as a last-minute appendix, we included a relatively un-researched notion of just ‘giving it away,’ and ironically, that’s the idea that eventually took root.”

“OpenCourseWare is a perfect example of how things can evolve in unexpected ways that sometimes surpass their original goals.”

Despite all his impressive credentials and a long list of awards, Abelson remains a warm, highly approachable person. His deep commitment to teaching earned him the prestigious MacVicar Faculty Fellow appointment in 1992. “When people ask me what I do,” he revealed in a recent interview celebrating MIT’s 150th anniversary, “I say that I’m a teacher. I think of myself this way as opposed to a computer scientist. It’s about putting across those ideas. The stuff we’re teaching right now is very precious and important. I want to instill in students some of that importance.”

Perhaps the simple fact that any of us can benefit from Professor Abelson’s teaching by calling up one of his online courses through OpenCourseWare is the most elegant proof of the power and reach of his ideas.

OCW Courses Taught by Professor Abelson

• 6.01SC Introduction to Electrical Engineering
• 6.805 Ethics and the Law on the Electronic Frontier
• 6.171 Software Engineering for Web Applications

By Peter Chipman, OCW Digital Publication Specialist and OCW Educator Assistant

These days, university professors worldwide are scrambling to begin teaching their classes online rather than in person. At the most basic level, some courses can be taught online using just streaming video (whether live or pre-recorded) and familiar, readily available technology such as email and group chat apps. But if you’re looking to step up your online teaching, you may find inspiration in reading about what tools MIT’s faculty have been adopting in recent years.

For an extensive list of OCW Instructor Insights pages in which instructors discuss their implementation of online teaching technology, simply visit the Educator Portal on the OCW website. Click on the “Instructor Insights” tab, and then scroll down the “Topics” menu to find and click on the topic “Teaching with Technology.” Here’s a sampling of the dozens of Instructor Insights pages you’ll find in that list:

Offering a Small Private Online Course

Professor Olivier de Weck taught 16.842 Fundamentals of Systems Engineering as a SPOC (that is, a small private online course), rather than a MOOC (a massive open online course). In his Instructor Insights video, he discusses how he collaborated with a university in Europe to overcome the challenge of hosting discussions among students located in widely different time zones.

Online Tutoring

Professor Dennis Freeman describes how he and his colleagues used an online tutoring environment in 6.01 Introduction to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science I to promote student self-assessment. He describes the tool they developed to help students make sure the code they were writing was performing as intended, and he explains how that tool could be generalized to serve other online tutoring functions in other courses.

Web-Based Problem Sets

Professors Wolfgang Ketterle muses on the advantages and challenges of using web-based problem sets in teaching 8.421 Atomic and Optical Physics I. Though he still sees value in traditional on-paper homework problems, he recognizes that for instructors who are tasked with teaching completely online, it’s “extremely encouraging to know that even very complicated questions can be transformed into web-based problems.”

Collaborative Text Annotation

Dr. Kurt Fendt and his teaching assistant Andrew Kelleher Stuhl use a tool called  Annotation Studio with students in CMS.633 Digital Humanities. Annotation Studio enables groups to annotate a text collaboratively, to highlight and comment on passages in the text, and to respond to one another’s comments. The tool, developed by Dr. Fendt’s digital humanities lab, was still in development at the time the course was first taught; the students were thus able to offer feedback that helped shape the evolution of the software.

Automated Answer Checking

Dr. Jeremy Orloff and Dr. Jonathan Bloom, the instructors for 18.05 Introduction to Probability and Statistics, believe that the best time for students to be made aware of their mistakes is when they’re still working on the assigned problems, rather than after the fact. In their Instructor Insights, they explain their decision to provide their students with an online tool that allows them to check their answers to problem sets before submitting them.

Onward and Upward with OCW Educator

We hope that the insights discussed above will inspire you to experiment with new tools and techniques in your own online teaching–and that you’ll return to the OCW Educator Portal in the future for insights on other aspects of teaching, whether that teaching is happening online or in a traditional classroom!

The 2020 MacVicar Faculty Fellows are (clockwise from top left):
Polina Anikeeva, Jacob White, William Tisdale, and Mary Fuller.
Photo credits (clockwise from top left):
Lillie Paquette, Sampson Wilcox, Webb Chappell, Jon Sachs

By Peter Chipman, OCW Digital Publication Specialist and OCW Educator Assistant

For the past 28 years, the MacVicar Faculty Fellows Program has honored several MIT professors each year who have made outstanding contributions to undergraduate teaching, educational innovation, and mentoring.

This year’s awardees are Professors Polina Anikeeva (materials science and engineering), Mary Fuller (literature), William Tisdale (chemical engineering), and Jacob White (electrical engineering and computer science).

OCW is honored to share courses from three of this year’s Fellows:

Polina Anikeeva

• • 3.024 Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Properties of Materials

Mary Fuller

• • 21L.002 Foundations of Western Culture II
  • 21L.704 Studies in Poetry: Gender and Lyric – Renaissance Men and Women Writing about Love
  • 21L.007J After Columbus
  • 21L.707 Writing Early American Lives: Gender, Race, Nation, Faith
  • 21L.315 Prizewinners
  • 21L.995 Special Topics in Literature: Milton’s “Paradise Lost”
  • 21L.705 Major Authors: John Milton
  • 21L.463 Renaissance Literature
  • 21L.007 World Literatures: Travel Writing
  • 21L.705 Major Authors: Rewriting Genesis: “Paradise Lost” and Twentieth-Century Fantasy
  • 21M.013J The Supernatural in Music, Literature and Culture
  • 21L.004 Reading Poetry

Jacob White

• • 6.336J Introduction to Numerical Simulation (SMA 5211)
  • 6.01SC Introduction to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science I
  • 16.920J Numerical Methods for Partial Differential Equations (SMA 5212)
  • 20.482J Foundations of Algorithms and Computational Techniques in Systems Biology

Interested in Instructor Insights from past MacVicar Fellows? Visit our OCW Educator portal to search for Insights from MIT Teaching Award Recipients. Delve into the minds of Arthur Bahr, Wit Busza, Catherine Drennan, Lorna Gibson, and many other MIT professors advancing teaching and learning in their fields.