Abstract: With 1,400 courses now available, MIT is delivering on the promise of MIT OpenCourseWare. We have heard from educators and learners around the world that they are benefiting from the materials offered freely and openly on the MIT OCW site. In order to understand how well MIT OCW is fulfilling its mission -- as well as to establish a thorough and continuous feedback process that guarantees its improvement over time -- we have developed a substantial evaluation program. The evaluation is focused on understanding specifics in three areas of user behavior: Access: Who is accessing MIT OCW, what are their profiles (educator, student, self-learner, other), what are their disciplines (or other interests), and where are they located? Use: How do educators and learners use MIT OCW and is MIT OCW designed appropriately to facilitate that use? To what extent and in what ways are MIT course materials adopted or adapted for teaching purposes? Impact: What effects -- positive or negative, intended or unintended -- are being realized through the use of MIT OCW? The evaluation was undertaken in 2005. Data collection employed an integrated "portfolio approach," as a combination of methods helped to achieve both breadth and depth in the evaluation.
Abstract: Using the Internet depends, in the first instance, on access to the network. The initial emergence of "the Internet" in the early 1990s, from the increasing connectivity of a series of university and government networks alongside private services like America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe, occurred almost entirely across slow dial-up modem connections over telephone wires. Sufficient for email, Usenet news groups, transferring relatively small files, and later viewing simple web pages, slow transfer made consumption of data rich content infuriating and its provision unprofitable. There was, however, an important compatibility between the Internet architecture and the plain old telephone system. The basic protocols of the Internet treat all information as equal. They do not recognize rich content or poor content, content owned by one person or another. So too, the basic telephone network, because it is regulated as a common carrier by the FCC, was required to treat all these data calls alike. These consistencies meant that in this new medium, unlike in the mass media of the 20th century -- television, cable, and newspapers -- no one had much of an advantage over anyone else in communicating their views to the world. The low bandwidth available also meant that "production value" -- expensive sets and cameras -- that also limited access to the opportunities to speak in traditional mass media, were less important. The result was a substantially more egalitarian communications medium than any that the 19th and 20th century had known, at least for a while and for limited communications applications.
Abstract: Analyzes the health policy problems facing America including adequate access to care, the control of health care costs, and the encouragement of medical advances. Considers market and regulatory alternatives as well as possible foreign models including Canadian, Swedish, British, and German arrangements. Emphasis on historical development, interest group behavior, and organizational influences in setting and implementing policy.
Abstract: This graduate-level class explores the complex interrelationships among humans and natural environments, focusing on non-western parts of the world in addition to Europe and the United States. It uses environmental conflict to draw attention to competing understandings and uses of "nature" as well as the local, national and transnational power relationships in which environmental interactions are embedded. In addition to utilizing a range of theoretical perspectives, this subject draws upon a series of ethnographic case studies of environmental conflicts in various parts of the world.
Abstract: This class explores the interrelationship between humans and natural environments. It does so by focusing on conflict over access to and use of the environment as well as ideas about "nature" in various parts of the world.
Abstract: Seminar in real-time language comprehension. Models of sentence and discourse comprehension from the linguistic, psychology, and artificial intelligence literature, including symbolic and connectionist models. Ambiguity resolution. Linguistic complexity. The use of lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, contextual and prosodic information in language comprehension. The relationship between the computational resources available in working memory and the language processing mechanism. The psychological reality of linguistic representations.