Online courses directory (19947)

By Stephanie Marrus and Naeem Zafar

By Chuck Eesley

This course will examine literature and practice regarding community-owned enterprise as an alternative means of increasing community participation and development. The use of cooperatives, credit unions, land trusts, and limited stock ownership enterprises for increasing community participation and empowerment will be examined.

Urban governance comprises the various forces, institutions, and movements that guide economic and physical development, the distribution of resources, social interactions, and other aspects of daily life in urban areas. This course examines governance from legal, political, social, and economic perspectives. In addition, we will discuss how these structures constrain collective decision making about particular urban issues (immigration, education…). Assignments will be nightly readings and a short paper relating an urban issue to the frameworks outlined in the class.

An old saying holds that "there are many more good ideas in the world than good ideas implemented." This is a case based introduction to the fundamentals of effective implementation. Developed with the needs and interests of planners—but also with broad potential application—in mind, this course is a fast paced, case driven introduction to developing strategy for organizations and projects, managing operations, recruiting and developing talent, taking calculated risks, measuring results (performance), and leading adaptive change, for example where new mental models and habits are required but also challenging to promote. Our cases are set in the U.S. and the developing world and in multiple work sectors (urban redevelopment, transportation, workforce development, housing, etc.). We will draw on public, private, and nonprofit implementation concepts and experience.

This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.

This seminar provides intensive study of exciting texts by four influential American authors. In studying paired works, we can enrich our sense of each author's distinctive methods, get a deeper sense of the development of their careers, and shake up our preconceptions about what makes an author or a work "great." Students will get an opportunity to research an author in depth, as well as making broader comparisons across the syllabus.

This course provides the opportunity for students-as readers, viewers, writers and speakers-to engage with social and ethical issues they care deeply about. Over the course of the semester, through discussing the writing of classic and contemporary authors, we will explore different perspectives on a range of social issues such as free speech, poverty and homelessness, mental illness, capital punishment and racial and gender inequality. In addition, we will analyze selected documentary and feature films and photographs that represent or dramatize social problems or issues. In assigned essays, students will have the opportunity to write about social and ethical issues of their own choice. This course aims to help students to grow significantly in their ability to understand and grapple with arguments, to integrate secondary print and visual sources and to craft well-reasoned and elegant essays. Students will also keep a reading journal and give oral presentations. In class we will discuss assigned texts, explore strategies for successful academic writing, freewrite and respond to one another's essays.

By Sara Rutherford-Quach, Jeff Zwiers and Kenji Hakuta

This section of Expository Writing provides the opportunity for students- as readers, viewers, writers and speakers - to engage with social and ethical issues that they care deeply about. Through discussing selected documentary and feature films and the writings of such authors as Maya Angelou, Robert Coles, Charles Dickens, Barbara Ehrenreich, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jonathan Kozol, and Alice Walker, we will explore different perspectives on a range of social problems such as poverty, homelessness, and racial and gender inequality. In assigned essays, students will have the opportunity to write about social and ethical issues of their own choice. This course aims to help students to grow significantly in their ability to understand and grapple with arguments, to integrate secondary print and visual sources and to craft well-reasoned and elegant essays. Students will also keep a reader-writer notebook and give at least one oral presentation. In class we will discuss assigned films and readings, explore strategies for successful academic writing, freewrite and critique one another's essays. Satisfies Phase I and CI Writing Requirements.

"Creative activity (isn't) the icing on the cake. Human creativity is the cake." (Jerry Hirschberg)

Creativity - "the mastery of information and skills in the service of dreams" (Hirschberg) - is much prized in the arts, science, business and the classroom. What does the creative process look like? Under what conditions does it flourish - what ignites the creative spark? Attempting to answer these questions, this class explores ways creativity has been understood in Western culture: what we prize and fear about creativity and its wellsprings; how writers, artists, scientists and inventors have described their own creative processes; how psychologists and philosophers have theorized it; ways in which creativity has been represented in Western culture, particularly in 20th century films; and creativity in everyday life, including our own lives. Readings include portions of psychologist Rollo May's The Courage To Create, and essays by Joan Didion, John Updike, Alice Walker, Oliver Sacks, and others. In addition, we'll watch video profiles of choreographer Paul Taylor, architect Maya Lin, and jazz musician Dave Brubeck. We'll keep journals in which we note our own observations and reflections on creative process. We will also watch a film together as a class one evening early in the term.

Environmentalists have traditionally relied upon the power of their prose to transform the thoughts and behavior of their contemporaries. In this class, we will do our best to follow in their footsteps. We will consider the strategies of popular science writers, lesser-known geologists, biologists, and hydrologists, and famous environmentalists. Students will have a chance to try out several ways of characterizing and explaining natural environments. Weekly writing exercises will help students develop and explore material for the longer papers.

"What people do with food is an act that reveals how they construe the world."
- Marcella Hazan, The Classic Italian Cookbook

If you are what you eat, what are you? Food is at once the stuff of life and a potent symbol; it binds us to the earth, to our families, and to our cultures. In this class, we explore many of the fascinating issues that surround food as both material fact and personal and cultural symbol. We read essays by Toni Morrison, Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry, and others on such topics as family meals, eating as an "agricultural act" (Berry), slow food, and food's ability to awaken us to "our own powers of enjoyment" (M. F. K. Fisher). We will also read Pollan's most recent book, In Defense of Food, and discuss the issues it raises as well as its rhetorical strategies. Assigned essays will grow out of memories and the texts we read, and may include personal narrative as well as essays that depend on research. Revision of essays and workshop review of writing in progress are an important part of the class. Each student will make one oral presentation in this class.

By Kenji Hakuta, Jeff Zwiers and Sara Rutherford-Quach

This course is an introduction to writing prose for a public audience—specifically, prose that is both critical and personal, that features your ideas, your perspective, and your voice to engage readers. The focus of our reading and your writing will be American popular culture, broadly defined. That is, you will write essays that critically engage elements and aspects of contemporary American popular culture and that do so via a vivid personal voice and presence. In the coming weeks we will read a number of pieces that address current issues in popular culture. These readings will address a great many subjects from the contemporary world to launch and elaborate an argument or position or refined observation. And you yourselves will write a great deal, attending always to the ways your purpose in writing and your intended audience shape what and how you write. The end result of our collaborative work will be a new edition, the seventh, of Culture Shock!, an online magazine of writings on American popular culture, which we will post on the Web for the worldwide reading public to enjoy.

The reading and writing for this course will focus on what it means to construct a sense of self and a life narrative in relation to the larger social world of family and friends, education, media, work, and community. Readings will include nonfiction and fiction works by authors such as Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Andre Dubus, Anne Frank, Tim O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Amy Tan, Tobias Wolff, and Alice Walker. Students will explore the craft of storytelling and the multiple ways in which one can employ the tools of fiction in crafting creative nonfiction and fiction narratives.

In this era of globalization, many of us have multi- or bi-cultural, multilingual or bilingual backgrounds, and even if we don't have such a background, we need urgently to understand the experiences of people who do. You will very likely work outside the United States at some point in your future; you will almost certainly work with people who speak more than one language, whose ancestry or origins are in a country other than the U.S., who have crossed borders of nation, language, culture, class to amalgamate into the large and diverse culture that is America. In this class we will read the personal narratives of bilingual and bicultural writers, some of whom have struggled to assimilate, others of whom have celebrated their own contributions to a culture of diversity. You will write four personal essays of your own for the class, each of which will receive workshop discussion in class and response from me; you will then revise the essays to polish them for possible publication. One of your essays will be an investigative one, where you will focus on a subject of your choice, investigate it thoroughly, and then write with authority about it. The process of the class will encourage you to both improve your writing significantly and gain a greater understanding of experiences of people who are in some way like you as well as those who are in some way different.

MIT students bring rich cultural backgrounds to their college experience. This course explores the splits, costs, confusions, insights, and opportunities of living in two traditions, perhaps without feeling completely at home in either. Course readings include accounts of growing up Asian-American, Hispanic, Native American, and South-East Asian-American, and of mixed race. The texts include selections from Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Kesaya E. Noda's "Growing Up Asian in America," Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek, Gary Soto's "Like Mexicans," Sherman Alexie's The Toughest Indian in the World, Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, the movies Smoke Signals and Mississippi Masala, Danzy Senna's Caucasia, and others. We will also use students' writings as ways to investigate our multiple identities, exploring the constraints and contributions of cultural and ethnic traditions. Students need not carry two passports in order to enroll; an interest in reading and writing about being shaped by multiple influences suffices.

This is the second part of a course that introduces the fundamentals of technology entrepreneurship, pioneered in Silicon Valley and now spreading across the world. You will learn the process technology entrepreneurs use to start companies, which involves taking a technology idea and finding a...

Entre más irreversibles son las decisiones que un proyecto involucra, mayor esfuerzo debe asignarse a la valorización de sus distintas alternativas. Este curso muestra como evaluar proyectos utilizando las metodologías financieras tradicionales de flujos de caja descontados, incorporando en las...

Over the course of the semester we will explore the full range of writings by physicians and other health practitioners. Some of the writer/physicians that we encounter will be Atul Gawande, Danielle Ofri, Richard Selzer, and William Carlos Williams. Students need have no special training, only a general interest in medicine or in public health issues such as AIDS, asthma, malaria control, and obesity. The writing assignments, like the readings, will invite students to consider the distinctive needs of different audiences.