Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Latest Info about MIT's OCW Here's a section of the the July report about updates to MIT's OpenCourseWare. JH____ --------------------------------------------------------------- The MIT OpenCourseWare Update: July 2004 A Monthly E-mail Newsletter for Users and Friends of MIT OpenCourseWare ---------------------------------------------------------------- The July 2004 MIT OpenCourseWare Update Contains: 1. New Courses Now Available 2. Digging Deeper: Course 3. A Frequently Asked Question 4. Comments 5. Newsletter Available Online at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/AboutOCW/newsletter.htm 1. New Courses Now Available ---------------------------------------------------------------- Over the course of the summer, MIT OpenCourseWare will employ a "rolling" publication schedule, releasing batches of new courses to the Web site at http://ocw.mit.edu on a weekly basis, leading to the publication of 200 new courses by September 15. This milestone will mark the halfway point as MIT OCW works toward the publication of virtually all of MIT's courses by the year 2008. This month, we are pleased to offer the course materials from seven new MIT subjects, including: Anthropology 21A.336 -- Marketing, Microchips and McDonalds: Debating Globalization, Spring 2004 21A.337J -- Documenting Culture, Spring 2004 21A.338J -- Gender, Power, and International Development, Fall 2003 Economics 14.731 -- Economic History, Fall 2003 Political Science 17.03 -- Introduction to Political Thought, Spring 2004 17.037 -- American Political Thought, Spring 2004 Sloan School of Management 15.810 -- Introduction to Marketing, Spring 2004   MIT OCW will continue to publish new courses every week through September 15. For a complete list of all course offerings, visit the complete course list. Look for notice of new courses in subsequent issues of "The MIT OpenCourseWare Update" email newsletter. 2. Digging Deeper: Course 21W.785 --------------------------------------------------------------- Each month, this newsletter offers subscribers an in-depth guide to one particular subject. This month, we delve into Professor Edward Barrett's "Course 21W.785 -- Communicating in Cyberspace, Fall 2003," from MIT's Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. The Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies offers MIT students the opportunity to learn the techniques, forms, and traditions of several kinds of writing, from basic expository prose to more advanced forms of non-fictional prose, fiction and poetry, science writing, scientific and technical communication, and digital media. The Program's faculty consists of novelists, essayists, poets, translators, biographers, historians, engineers, and scientists -- including Professor Barrett, the general editor of the MIT Press Series on Digital Communication and director of the MIT Undergraduate Technical Writing Cooperative. Professor Barrett's course covers the analysis, design, implementation and testing of various forms of digital communication based on group collaboration. Students are encouraged to think about the Web and other new digital interactive media not just in terms of technology, but also broader issues such as language (verbal and visual), design, information architecture, communication and community. Students work in small groups on a semester-long project of their choice. The course includes a Related Resources section with examples of excellent and poor Web design. This section also offers links to useful technologies for student projects, including Apache, Flash, Java and JavaScript, MySQL, and TomCat. And users are encouraged to check out the rich collection of Readings, several of which are freely downloadable, including "Designing the User Experience" and "Websites as Metaphors," by Deborah A. Levinson. 12:09:28 PM    COMMENT []