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In John's February Newsletter

Chalk Radio Is Here!

MIT OpenCourseWare is proud to announce the premiere of a new podcast series.

Chalk Radio is a podcast about inspired teaching at MIT, hosted by Dr. Sarah Hansen. The show takes listeners behind the scenes of some of the most interesting courses on campus to talk with the professors who make those courses possible. The guests on Chalk Radio open up to us about the passions that drive their cutting-edge research and innovative teaching, sharing stories that are candid, funny, serious, personal, and full of insights. Listening in on these conversations is like being present in person under the MIT dome, talking with your favorite professors.

About the Guests

In the first episodes, we talk with a nuclear science professor who finds surprisingly entertaining educational uses for MIT’s fission reactor, and with an African studies professor who asks her students to attend theatrical performances out in the “real world.”

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> Listen and subscribe to the podcast

Rhombille tiling—a tessellation of identical 60° rhombi on the Euclidean plane.

18.212 Algebraic Combinatorics This course covers the applications of algebra to combinatorics. Topics include enumeration methods, permutations, partitions, partially ordered sets and lattices, Young tableaux, graph theory, matrix tree theorem, electrical networks, convex polytopes, and more.

RES.TLL-005 How to Speak Patrick Winston's How to Speak talk has been an MIT tradition for over 40 years. Offered every January during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), usually to overflow crowds, the talk is intended to improve your speaking ability in critical situations by teaching you a few heuristic rules. Professor Winston's collection of rules is presented along with examples of their application in job-interview talks, thesis defenses, oral examinations, and lectures.

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Learning to Read the Scholarly Literature

Specimens from a line of cultured human cells used for medical research. (Image by Tom Deerinck, National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research, courtesy of NIH Image Gallery on Flickr. License CC BY.)

Students in MIT Biology’s Advanced Undergraduate Seminars hone their professional skills by studying specialized topics in depth.

If you browse the OpenCourseWare offerings in Biology, quickly skimming the list of course numbers, you’re likely to be struck by how many courses have numbers between 7.340 and 7.349: there are eight versions of 7.340, ten versions of 7.341, eighteen versions of 7.342, and so on. In fact, these ten course numbers account for well over half of the OCW courses in Biology.

Why do we include so many versions of the same few subjects? Actually, all of the courses with numbers 7.340 through 7.349 are on different topics, though they’re all the same in one crucial respect: they’re all Advanced Undergraduate Seminars. The Advanced Undergraduate Seminars are courses designed to allow students to study and discuss primary literature while learning about current biological research.

How They Work

Prerequisites vary slightly from one course to another, but the seminars typically require students to have taken introductory courses in topics such as cell biology, molecular biology, and genetics.

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