The MIT OpenCourseWare Update -- Vol. 2, Issue 12

Hundreds of MIT students, faculty and staff welcomed MIT's new president, Dr. Susan Hockfield, at an MIT campus-wide celebration on her first day on the job on December 6, 2004.

Hockfield, the former provost of Yale University and a noted neuroscientist, had been elected on August 26 as the 16th president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, succeeding Charles M. Vest, who has led one of the world's foremost research universities for the past 14 years.

In making the announcement, Dana G. Mead, Chairman of the MIT Corporation who elected Hockfield, said, "As a strong advocate of the vital role that science, technology, and the research university play in the world, and with an exceptional record of achievement in serving faculty and student interests, Dr. Hockfield is clearly the best person to lead MIT in the years ahead. She brings to MIT an outstanding record as teacher, scientist and inspirational leader with a reputation for bringing out the best in all the people with whom she works."

Hockfield joined the Yale faculty in 1985. She was promoted to full professor in 1994 and quickly rose to the center of leadership at Yale, first as Dean of Yale's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1998-2002), with oversight of over 70 graduate programs, and then as Provost, the university's chief academic and administrative officer, with oversight of the University's 12 schools. She earned her bachelor's degree in biology from the University of Rochester in 1973, and earned a Ph.D. in anatomy and neuroscience from Georgetown University School of Medicine in 1979.

"Around the world, MIT stands as an emblem of discovery and innovation, produced through the scholarship of its outstanding faculty, students and graduates," Hockfield said of her election to the top post at MIT. "From my first conversations in the search process, the Institute's central themes -- the pursuit of truth, integrity, and the great meritocracy -- have resonated with my own core values. This remarkable community's curiosity, intellectual commitment and passionate determination to solve problems have brought immeasurable benefit to humankind. It is an enormous honor and a very great privilege to have been selected to join this effort as MIT's next president."

She succeeds Vest, who had led MIT for the past 14 years and has been a passionate advocate of the MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) project. Read more about Charles M. Vest.

How can the individual be at once cause and consequence of society, a unique agent of social action and also a social product? Why are some people accepted and celebrated for their particular features while other people and behaviors are considered deviant and stigmatized?

This month, we explore Course 21A.218J: Identity and Difference, a course from the MIT Anthropology Program that examines theoretical perspectives on human identity, focusing on processes of creating categories of acceptable and deviant identities. Professor Susan Silbey examines how identities are formed, how they vary, the forms and possibilities of unique or aggregate identities, how behaviors are labeled deviant, how people enter deviant roles and worlds, responses to differences and strategies of coping with these responses on the individual and group level.

Throughout the course, Professor Silbey uses gender and sexuality as an example of frequently stigmatized forms of identity. Thus, this course is cross-listed in the MIT Program in Women's Studies.

This course features a set of 10 Lecture Notes, including #7, a lecture discussion about "Becoming Deviant." The course also offers a rich Reading List, and a description of the Essay Assignments that explore issues of human identity.

ANSWER: It is true that almost all of the video available on the MIT OCW site is in Real Media format, but we offer our users a link to the free, downloadable version of RealPlayer on the MIT OCW Technical Requirements page.

We would consider -- and, in fact, actively encourage -- an open source solution. However, in order to offer downloadable video content in an open mpeg format, we would have to prepare all of our video offerings encoded into two formats: Real Video and either mpeg2 or mpeg4, and this would be cost-prohibitive at this point in the MIT OCW project.

When we decided at the launch of the MIT OCW project in 2002 to go with the Real version, we were not aware of any open streaming formats that were widely available, and just as importantly, cross-platform compatible. As far as we know, the Internet Archive has not made any "sector leader suggestions" about open streaming options. If any of our users have a suggestion, we appreciate any suggestions.

MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is a large-scale, Web-based publishing initiative with the goal of providing free, searchable access to MIT course materials for educators, students, and individual learners around the world. These materials are offered in a single, searchable structure spanning all of MIT's academic disciplines, and include uniform metadata about the contents of the individual subject sites.

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