Courses tagged with "Information environments" (1105)

This participatory seminar focuses on the knowledge and skills necessary for teaching science and engineering in higher education. It is designed for graduate students interested in an academic career, and anyone else interested in teaching. Students research and present a relevant topic of particular interest. The subject is appropriate for both novices and those with teaching experience.

This participatory seminar focuses on the knowledge and skills necessary for teaching science and engineering in higher education. This course is designed for graduate students interested in an academic career, and anyone else interested in teaching. Topics include theories of adult learning; course development; promoting active learning, problem-solving, and critical thinking in students; communicating with a diverse student body; using educational technology to further learning; lecturing; creating effective tests and assignments; and assessment and evaluation. Students research and present a relevant topic of particular interest. The subject is appropriate for both novices and those with teaching experience.

The Team Project has the goals of (1) developing teamwork and leadership skills and (2) learning from the analysis of a change initiative in a real-world company using concepts from other core courses. This class has no regular class schedule or weekly readings. Almost everything is oriented around your team and your project, with only a few deadlines. Each team is responsible for analyzing a recent, ongoing, or anticipated initiative at a real company. Examples might be a strategic reorientation, organizational restructuring, introduction of a new technology, or worker participation program.

This course is closely integrated with other MBA core classes: readings are assigned through Organizational Processes (15.311) and oral presentations are given in Communication for Managers (15.280).

6.825 is a graduate-level introduction to artificial intelligence. Topics covered include: representation and inference in first-order logic, modern deterministic and decision-theoretic planning techniques, basic supervised learning methods, and Bayesian network inference and learning.

This course was also taught as part of the Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA) programme as course number SMA 5504 (Techniques in Artificial Intelligence).

This course explores the potential impact of modern technologies on the school reforms debate. The first part of the course provides an overview of the current state of the school reform debate and reviews the ideas in the progressive school reform movement, as well as examining the new public charter school in Cambridge as a case study. The second part of the course requires critical study of research projects that hold promise as inspirations and guidelines for concrete multidisciplinary activities and curriculum for progressive charter schools. The course concludes with a discussion of the challenges in scaling the successful innovations in school reform to new contexts.

This course explores the design of innovative educational technologies and creative learning environments, drawing on specific case studies such as the LEGO® Programmable Brick, Scratch software and Computer Clubhouse after-school learning centers. Includes activities with new educational technologies, reflections on learning experiences, and discussion of strategies and principles underlying the design of new tools and activities.

This course considers the historical dimensions of rural production from subsistence to industrialization, both in America and in an international context, with an emphasis on the role of science and technology. Topics include changing notions of progress; emergence of genetics and its complex applications to food production; mechanization of both farm practices and the food industry; role of migrant labor; management theory and its impact on farm practice; role of federal governments and NGOs in production systems; women in food production systems; and the green revolution.

Our linked subjects are (1) the historical process by which the meaning of technology has been constructed, and (2) the concurrent transformation of the environment. To explain the emergence of technology as a pivotal word (and concept) in contemporary public discourse, we will examine responses — chiefly political and literary — to the development of the mechanic arts, and to the linked social, cultural, and ecological transformation of 19th- and 20th-century American society, culture, and landscape.

Note: In the interests of freshness and topicality we regard the STS.464 syllabus as sufficiently flexible to permit some — mostly minor — variations from year to year. One example of a different STS.464 syllabus can be found in STS.464 Cultural History of Technology, Spring 2005.

This course features a core framework for an interest-based, problem-solving approach to technology, logistics and other systems-oriented negotiations. A comprehensive approach to dispute resolution in organizations and complex engineered systems is also developed. The course builds key interactive skills, including communications skills, dealing with difficult people, negotiating over the "rules of game," and cross-cultural negotiations. Assignments center on analysis of negotiated interactions and assessing dispute resolution systems.

Technology Policy Negotiations and its prequel, ESD.932, Technology Policy Organizations, form a sequence on Organizational Processes in Technology Policy. This course provides a core framework for an interest-based approach to negotiations, along with a systems approach to dispute resolution in organizations. Core interactive skills are developed, including communication skills, negotiating over the "rules of game," and cross-cultural negotiations. Key assignments center on ethical debates in technology policy, regional economic development challenges, and assessment of organizational dispute resolution systems.

This course provides a series of strategic frameworks for managing high-technology businesses. The emphasis throughout the course is on the development and application of conceptual models which clarify the interactions between competition, patterns of technological and market change, and the structure and development of organizational capabilities.

This is not a course in how to manage product or process development. The main focus is on the acquisition of a set of powerful analytical tools which are critical for the development of a technology strategy as an integral part of business strategy. These tools can provide the framework for deciding which technologies to invest in, how to structure those investments and how to anticipate and respond to the behavior of competitors, suppliers, and customers. The course should be of particular interest to those interested in managing a business for which technology is likely to play a major role, and to those interested in consulting or venture capital.

This course provides you with a framework to understand the structure and dynamics of high-tech businesses, together with an approach for their effective strategic management. It is focused on domains in which systems are important, because either or both products are parts of larger and more complex systems, or they are comprised of systems. The domains covered include computing, communications (in particular the mobile and IP domains), consumer electronics, industrial networking, automotive, aerospace and medical devices. The course will be of particular interest to those interested in managing a business in which technology will likely play a major role, and also to those interested in investing in or providing counsel to these businesses.

The emphasis throughout is on the development and application of ways of thinking or mental models that bring clarity to the complex co-evolution of technological innovation, the demand opportunity, systems architecture, business ecosystems, and decision-making and execution within the business.

This course addresses the relationship between technology-related problems and the law applicable to work environment. The National Labor Relations Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, state worker's compensation, and suits by workers in the courts are discussed in the course. Problems related to occupational health and safety, collective bargaining as a mechanism for altering technology in the workplace, job alienation, productivity, and the organization of work are also addressed. Prior courses or experience in environmental, public health, or law-related areas will be useful.

This course covers how to leverage major technology advances to significantly transform a business in the marketplace. There is a focus on major issues a business must deal with to transform its technical and market strategies successfully, including the organizational and cultural aspects that often cause such business transformations to fail. Class material draws from concrete experiences of IBM's major transformation in the late 1990s, when it aggressively embraced the Internet and came up with its e-business strategy.

Hacking and trolling; mass murders and bullying. What do these have in common? One theory holds that these are all "deviant" social behaviors, occurring both online and off, which have purportedly been brought about or exacerbated by our new media environment. Such aberrant behaviors seemingly give us ample reason to fear digital and social media. But is technology to blame? We will grapple with this question as we investigate how our understanding of new technologies and media is socially shaped and, in turn, how new media might influence our social behavior.

We will begin by studying how similar panics about "old" media (books, film, television and even the written word itself) set historical precedents for these current fears. Along the way we will establish and explore issues embedded in debates about new media, including questions of class, gender, youth, sex, and violence. Such topics will be placed in cross-cultural perspective, allowing us to compare the nature of panics over contemporary events and issues—e.g. the Columbine school shootings, cyber-bullying, Japanese otaku, and the Chinese "Human Flesh Search Engine"—occurring within both the United States and East Asia. Students will read essays, keep media journals and watch films pertaining to weekly topics.

Twentieth and twenty-first century architecture is defined by its rhetorical subservience to something called "technology." Architecture relates to technology in multiple forms, as the organizational basis of society, as production system, as formal inspiration, as mode of temporization, as communicational vehicle, and so on. Managerial or "systems-based" paradigms for societal, industrial and governmental organization have routinely percolated into architecture's considerations, at its various scales from the urban to the domestic, of the relationships of parts to wholes.

This graduate seminar introduces an emerging research program within International Relations on territorial conflict. While scholars have recognized that territory has been one of the most frequent issues over which states go to war, territorial conflicts have only recently become the subject of systematic study. This course will examine why territorial conflicts arise in the first place, why some of these conflicts escalate to high levels of violence and why other territorial disputes reach settlement, thereby reducing the likelihood of war. Readings in the course draw upon political geography and history as well as qualitative and quantitative approaches to political science.

This course proposes that investigating the ways in which territory is produced, maintained and strategized, generates conflicts, establishes divisions, and builds identities can lead to a more critical understanding of architecture's role in society. This course is designed to expand the student's literacy in the concept of territory and its relation to the realm of architecture.

This course explores a range of contemporary scholarship oriented to the study of 'cybercultures,' with a focus on research inspired by ethnographic and more broadly anthropological perspectives. Taking anthropology as a resource for cultural critique, the course will be organized through a set of readings chosen to illustrate central topics concerning the cultural and material practices that comprise digital technologies. We'll examine social histories of automata and automation; the trope of the 'cyber' and its origins in the emergence of cybernetics during the last century; cybergeographies and politics; robots, agents and humanlike machines; bioinformatics and artificial life; online sociality and the cyborg imaginary; ubiquitous and mobile computing; ethnographies of research and development; and geeks, gamers and hacktivists. We'll close by considering the implications for all of these topics of emerging reconceptualizations of sociomaterial relations, informed by feminist science and technology studies.

Survey of principles underlying the structure and function of the nervous system, integrating molecular, cellular, and systems approaches. Topics: development of the nervous system and its connections, cell biology or neurons, neurotransmitters and synaptic transmission, sensory systems of the brain, the neuro-endocrine system, the motor system, higher cortical functions, behavioral and cellular analyses of learning and memory. First half of an intensive two-term survey of brain and behavioral studies for first-year graduate students.