Chalk Radio

Many people associate the word “sustainability” with a few specific activities such as composting or recycling. Our guests for this episode, Dr. Liz Potter-Nelson and Sarah Meyers, point out that sus…

Nobody comes into this world already knowing how to teach—and most students arrive at undergraduate or graduate programs without any teaching experience at all. For those who are selected to be teach…

In this episode we meet Haynes Miller, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, who in his 35+ years of active teaching at MIT has done much to shape the institute’s math curriculum. Prof. Miller’s special…

Eric Grimson is MIT’s chancellor for academic advancement and interim vice president for Open Learning; he’s also a longstanding professor of computer science and medical engineering. In this episode…

MIT has long been an innovator in online education. For even longer—for its whole history, in fact—it has championed hands-on learning. These two emphases may seem incompatible, but the MICRO initiat…

Do you always make the best possible choices, even when you’re stressed or short on sleep? The ideally rational person (“Homo economicus”) assumed by conventional economics always acts in ways that a…

To most people, especially those who are too young to remember the Cold War, the possibility of nuclear Armageddon may seem so remote as not to be worth contemplating. But Prof. Bob Redwine and Jim W…

Professor Gigliola Staffilani, who teaches in MIT’s Department of Mathematics, was closely involved in designing and teaching the introductory-level 18.01 Calculus I course series now found on the MI…

Though there’s widespread consensus that the slavery and colonization that characterize the history of European relations with Africa represent a legacy of grave injustice, there is much less agreeme…

When humans interact, they don’t just pass information from one to the other; there’s always some relational element, with the participants responding to each other’s emotional cues. Professor Cynthi…

In the previous episode we learned about a project undertaken as part of the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) initiative at MIT’s Schwartzman College of Computing. In this epis…

When computer science was in its infancy, programmers quickly realized that though computers are astonishingly powerful tools, the results they achieve are only as good as the data you feed into them…

Most of the students in Professor Dennis McLaughlin’s course 1.74 Land, Water, Food, and Climate come to it with established opinions on some very controversial topics: whether GMOs are safe, whether…

Students in MIT’s course 5.310 Laboratory Chemistry have a state-of-the art lab to work in, with energy-saving hibernating fume hoods and a new spectrometer that achieves mind-blowingly precise measu…

Sanjay Sarma is not only a professor of mechanical engineering; he’s also Vice President for Open Learning at MIT, where he oversees innovative efforts to reimagine education, and he is coauthor (wit…

Nancy Kanwisher, founding member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, describes the effort to understand the mind as “the gr…

Contemporary Movements for Justice is an MIT course in which scholars and activists speak about pursuing justice for European colonialism in Africa and its contemporary legacies. 

Do you have ideas th…

The classic New England town meeting, with voters gathered in a large hall to decide issues directly, is often cited as the purest form of American democracy. But historically, those town meetings ga…

In our previous episode we met Professor Dava Newman, cofounder of the nonprofit group EarthDNA. Today’s guest is Brandon Leshchinskiy, a graduate student in Technology and Policy at MIT’s Institute …

Professor Dava Newman is an aerospace engineer whose career has largely focused on developing improved space suits for eventual interplanetary travel. But in recent years she has turned her sights ba…