About the Ed Tech Times

Vijay Kumar, Director, Academic Computing, Assistant Provost
Jean Foster, Editor, Ed Tech Times

We are happy to introduce the Ed Tech Times – an interactive, online vehicle for communication about academic computing and educational technology. The change in format and delivery from its predecessor, the Insider, is intended to address the current nature of educational technology activity at MIT – dynamic and diverse, with a high level of widespread engagement. Our hope is that through the active participation and contributions of faculty, staff, and students, this interactive site will become a rich and relevant resource for the community.

Sharing Strategies and Solutions

This is a period marked by important growth and transitions in the educational technology landscape of MIT. Significant initiatives such as TEAL, iLab, and OpenCourseWare (OCW) are looking to move into the next phase of implementation. New services and areas of activity such as High Performance Computing and Spatial Data have been launched, changes in the student computing environment are being planned, a sustainable software infrastructure for education is being built, and of course, there is a new organization, Information Services and Technology (IS&T), to help support this work. In light of these projects, more than ever there is great need to share strategy and solutions and to receive feedback to support good decisions and useful practice.

The primary purpose of the Ed Tech Times is to provide a forum for the MIT academic community to announce and discuss these developments as they occur. Posted content will include articles about new or updated educational technology services and research projects on campus, links to educational technology news from outside campus, as well as announcements of upcoming events or presentations about education technologies such as Crosstalk seminars or training opportunities.

Interactive Features

This newsletter has been designed to be interactive, allowing readers to post comments on article content. Comments will be subject to review before they are posted to ensure appropriateness for a world-readable site, but we want to hear your comments and welcome discussions about the material posted here.

Other features of the Ed Tech Times include the ability to subscribe to e-mail updates whenever a new article is posted, or to receive a regular bimonthly email synopsis of articles posted over the past two months. To receive automatic e-mail updates of new articles, write your e-mail address in the "Notify Me" fill-in box which is located in the lower left hand side of the Ed Tech Times web page, below the "Search" box. To receive bimonthly updates, send e-mail to edtech-times@mit.edu

Those who use RSS readers can also receive updates of new postings by linking to http://edtech.mit.edu/times/index.rdf from their RSS reader.

We welcome submissions of educational technology news from other organizations on campus. Articles may be submitted electronically via email, either in plain text or as attachments in MS Word (.doc) or Rich Text (.rtf) format. Submissions will go through an editorial review before being posted on the site.

We'd like to know what you think about this new format for educational technology news. Please add your comments below or send email to edtech-times@mit.edu.