Education, teaching, academics

Institute Prof. Barbara Liskov discusses the importance of including ethics and foresight as a key parts of computer science education, reports Susan D'Agostino for Inside Higher Ed. “The days of being naïvely technical, which we were for many years, are over,” says Liskov. “We need to open students’ minds so they think about the harm that can come from what they’re doing and so they ask, ‘What could I add that could act as a safeguard?’ It’s more than ethics. They need to think from a different perspective.”

Prof. Cynthia Breazeal discusses her work exploring how artificial intelligence can help students impacted by Covid, including refugees or children with disabilities, reports Ryan Heath for Politico. “We want to be super clear on what the role is of the robot versus the community, of which this robot is a part of. That's part of the ethical design thinking,” says Breazeal. “We don't want to have the robot overstep its responsibilities. All of our data that we collect is protected and encrypted.”

The MIT Educational Justice Initiative has developed a 12-week program called Brave Behind Bars that teaches inmates “basic coding languages such as JavaScript and HTML in hopes of opening the door for detainees to one day pursue high-paying jobs,” reports Washington Post reporter Emily Davies. “The level of 21st century technology skills they just learned, I can’t do those things,” said Amy Lopez, deputy director of college and career readiness for the D.C. Department of Corrections. “They are transferrable, employable skills.”

Prof. Joshua Angrist speaks with CNBC about how his research on schooling and education has helped shaped government policy. “We don’t make specific policy recommendations, but we do encourage policy makers to look at the evidence,” says Angrist. “Whenever there is something on the public docket that is related to education policy, we always encourage both voters and politicians to look at the evidence.”

Alumna Anurupa Ganguly SB ’07, MNG ’09 speaks with Forbes contributor Rod Berger about Prisms of Reality, a virtual reality platform she founded that provides math learning through movement, experience and discovery. “We envision a dramatic re-engagement of our students with their education,” says Ganguly. “Our students, many for the first time, will find a profound sense of purpose in their math learning and their lives.”

Chiamaka Agbasi-Porter, the K-12 STEM outreach coordinator for Lincoln Lab, speaks with CBS Boston about her mission to help inspire young people to pursue STEM interests through the Lincoln Laboratory Radar Introduction for Student Engineers (LLRISE) program. “I think of it as a community,” said Agbasi-Porter, “we are a village that is helping our kids advance and move forward in their careers.”

GBH’s Basic Black host Callie Crossley speaks with Lecturer Malia Lazu,about how issues surrounding Covid-19, voting rights, economic downturn, police brutality, education, climate change and politics will impact communities of color in the coming year. “What I see is a democracy fighting itself,” says Lazu. "People in power, republicans or democrats, being bought into the idea of democracy more than the people in the democracy.”

New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall spotlights Prof. David Autor’s research exploring the state of men in the U.S., including the growing gender gaps in educational attainment and the labor market.   

A new report by MIT and Harvard researchers outlines a set of strategies for improving schooling during the Covid-19 pandemic, including focusing on core lessons, sparking joy and strengthening bonds between teachers and students, reports Naomi Martin for The Boston Globe.

Wired reporter Elizabeth notes how the ScratchJr programming language, which was developed to help teach children how to code, is being used as part of an effort to teach young children the basics of computer programming.

Writing for the Financial Times about financial training, Jonathan Moules spotlights the Sloan School of Management’s 18-month Master of Finance degree program. “This allows students an extra term to take additional courses and gain additional practical experience with a summer internship,” explains Heidi Pickett, assistant dean for the Master of Finance program.

Financial Times reporter Laura Noonan spotlights how the Sloan School developed programming aimed at increasing gender parity in the finance industry. “There is a part for academic institutions in terms of making sure women feel empowered to ask for a seat at the table,” says Heidi Pickett of the Master of Finance program.

During a Times Higher Ed summit, Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa, senior associate dean for open learning, emphasized the importance of integrating attention to ethical implications into AI education, reports Paul Baskin. “My plan is to educate a new generation of young people who will have intuition behind computational thinking,” says Miyagawa.

Reporting for NPR, Zeninjor Enwemeka spotlights MIT’s Ethics of Technology course, in which students explore how ethics is essential to their work as engineers and computer scientists. “I'm an ethicist, and I'm especially interested in these questions around ethics of things we make," explains postdoc and course instructor Abby Everett Jaques.

Writing for Times Higher Education, senior lecturer Anjali Sastry argues that entrepreneurship is a key component in finding solutions to complex global health problems. Sastry spotlights how MIT students are provided with hands-on opportunities to “learn analytics, systems thinking, effective business models and entrepreneurial processes. They aren’t just learning how to maximize profits, but ways to understand the market and craft systems.”