MITx: 3 Cheers and 3 Questions. Executive Command. Congratulations!
You have just been elected President of the United States. In Executive Command, you learn how to make whirlwind decisions and take charge. Pick your favorite issue! Now go to the Capital to make your State of the Union Address. Feels good in front of all those people doesn't it! Students from ages 7 and up will love playing Executive Command. Damon Horowitz: Philosophy in prison.
MITx: The Next Chapter for University Credentialing? A big announcement from MIT today: the university is launching a new online learning initiative, MITx, one that will allow non-enrolled students to take online courses and receive certification if they successfully complete them.
MIT has long been known for being on the leading edge of higher education experimentation, most notably with MIT OpenCourseware. The decision by MIT faculty to make all of their course materials freely and openly available online is now a decade old, and some 100 million people have downloaded and accessed that content.
But even with a catalog that boasts over 2,000 courses, MIT OCW has always been just that: courseware. All the syllabi, handouts, and quizzes, but no interaction with professors, no interaction with fellow learners, no grades, no college credit. What MITx is is still very much under construction. There's no indication yet of what that fee will be. MIT says that it plans to open-source the software infrastructure it's developing for MITx. AqqW7.jpg (460×567) Einstein - Cosmic Religion. By Albert Einstein (The following article by Albert Einstein appeared in the New York Times Magazine on November 9, 1930 pp 1-4.
It has been reprinted in Ideas and Opinions, Crown Publishers, Inc. 1954, pp 36 - 40. It also appears in Einstein's book The World as I See It, Philosophical Library, New York, 1949, pp. 24 - 28.) Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. The social impulses are another source of the crystallization of religion. The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, a development continued in the New Testament. Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science to religion very different from the usual one. Back. k0Szl.jpg (636×776)
Mayor, Mock Us. In 1993, the chancellor of the National University of Colombia, Antanas Mockus, addressed a crowd of students — a few thousand, by some estimations — only to find the student body hostile.
Mockus was the subject of booing and the occasional thrown item, so he reacted. He dropped his pants, turned around, and mooned the student body. Which is how he became the mayor of Bogota. Kind of. Mockus’ antics were not well received by the University’s leadership, and he was forced to resign his post. And then, things got even weirder.
As mayor, Mockus’ irreverence took center stage. Tactics like these were par for the course during Mockus’ two non-consecutive terms. But most notably, Mockus’ creativity shone when it came to stemming Bogota’s rampant traffic-related fatalities. Mockus’ political successes, however, did not extend past Bogota. Bonus fact: Citizen superheroes aren’t unique to Bogota. From the Archives: False Arrest: Why use mimes when you can use cardboard cutouts?