MIT hosted a city-wide biannual breakdance competition for a decade

Breakonomics at MIT
Breakonomics Competition 2009 sponsored by MIT’s Imobilare crew
My Aunt June told me about the breakdance competition she helped to found at MIT, the world’s best tech university. People don’t think of Breakdancing and performance art as typical geek activities but at MIT the arts are celebrated. Its Immobilare crew sponsored Boston’s biannual Breakonomics breakdance competition for about a decade, with the last competition taking place in 2011.

MIT’s Imobilare breakdance crew also held regular bboy practices on the MIT campus from 1998-2009: read more

Don’t want to be replaced by video lecturers? Up your game.

MOOC Wordle

MOOC cowPhilosophy professors at a public California University have spurned an offer to be replaced by online courses which are part of the edX initiative to offer lectures from Harvard, MIT and other top-level colleges to students at other universities in the form of video clips delivered on line. The San Jose State University professors point out in a public letter that the drive to cut education costs by replacing hands-on teaching with film clips constitutes a gross degradation of the educational experience their students will receive; that video teaching isn’t half as good mind fodder as reading a textbook is; and that it would be crazy for them to passively agree that a video lecture can teach students better than themselves, as real life professors, can. read more

Free University Education Programs

MITx: Online Teaching Model Beta Launching in 2012

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) takes its online teaching program to the next level with the new MITx initiative, which will be introduced this spring as a beta-testing model. Forbes magazine says, “MITx . . . will offer the online teaching of MIT courses free of charge to anyone in the world. The program will not allow students to earn an MIT degree. Instead, those who are able to exhibit a mastery of the subjects taught on the platform will receive an official certificate of completion.” read more