The wait is over! Season 3 of our podcast, Chalk Radio, is here (hear?) The first episode features Prof. Nancy Kanwisher from MIT’s Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department. She asks profound questions about the human mind, such as: What is knowledge? How does memory work? How do we form perceptions of the world?

Prof. Kanwisher also reflects on the usefulness of story as a teaching technique in courses like her 9.13 The Human Brain, which we'll tell you more about below if you keep reading.

In lecture 1 of the course, she tells a deeply personal tale of a friend who had a brain tumor that helped her understand more about the resiliency of the brain. Watch Lecture 1 on YouTube. 

Listen to the podcast episode “Sketching a Picture of the Mind with Prof. Nancy Kanwisher.” 

This course will introduce you to the concepts behind special relativity including, but not limited to, length contraction, time dilation, the Lorentz transformation, relativistic kinematics, Doppler shifts, and even so-called “paradoxes.” This course features video lectures! 

Visit the course Intro to Special Relativity  

This course proposes that most cities have neither the infrastructure nor the processes in place to support the demographically complex public in fulfilling its role in democracy. Through this course, participants will learn a set of design principles for creating public engagement practices necessary for building inclusive civic infrastructure in cities. 

Visit the course Engaging Community

As mentioned above under the Chalk Radio Podcast, we introduced you to Prof. Kanwisher, but here is the full course! This course surveys the core perceptual and cognitive abilities of the human mind and asks how they are implemented in the brain. Key themes include the representations, development, and degree of functional specificity of these components of mind and brain. The course will take students straight to the cutting edge of the field, empowering them to understand and critically evaluate empirical articles in the current literature. 

This course has full video lectures, lecture notes, assignments, and even a podcast episode!  

Visit the course the Human Brain 

Black feminist health science studies is a critical intervention into a number of intersecting arenas of scholarship and activism, including feminist health studies, contemporary medical curriculum reform conversations, and feminist technoscience studies. 

Visit the course Black Feminist Health Science Studies, taught by Dr. Moya Bailey 

Functional analysis is a branch of mathematics that helps to solve problems where the vector space is no longer finite-dimensional, a situation that arises very naturally in many concrete problems. 

Visit the course Intro to Functional Analysis 

This one-day workshop provides a brief overview of system dynamics and a hands-on simulation experience. 

Visit System Dynamics  

You Asked, We Answered 

Last month, OCW staff hosted a webinar sharing a behind-the-scenes look at the way we work. We were overwhelmed by the thoughtful questions and enthusiasm from everyone who tuned in or shared what was on your mind. (We received over 150 questions from the community for our one-hour event!). We invited the event’s panelists, OCW experts Sharon, Shiba, Brett, and Yvonne, back to answer some of your pressing questions about the making of OCW, our outreach and accessibility, and what the future holds. Check out their answers in this three-part blog series.  

Part 1  Part 2  Part 3 

MIT Anthropology Professor M. Amah Edoh is currently embarking on an audacious educational experiment. Currently teaching “21A.S01 Reparations for Slavery and Colononisation: Contemporary Movements for Justice” on campus, Edoh is also inviting the global public to participate in a way that is new both to her and OCW. Videos by guest lectures will be available on OCW’s YouTube channel at the same time they are available to students on campus. Edoh welcomes comments and questions from the global public, which will then inform the classroom discussion.  

To learn more read the recent article, “Global MIT Reparations Course Takes Open Learning to a New Level” in University World News.  This will also be available in a playlist on OCW's YouTube channel.

Share knowledge this GivingTuesday! 

Save the date—the day of giving returns on November 30! GivingTuesday is a global generosity movement, unleashing the power of radical generosity to transform communities and the world. 

Radical openness and radical generosity have always been part of who we are. We share knowledge and resources with the world so that learners anywhere can improve their lives, communities, and our planet. At OCW we often say that knowledge is your reward, and now you can help us share that reward with the millions of people who use OCW every year and the millions more who are waiting to discover it.

In honor of Giving Tuesday, we invite you to join us in being generous and sharing knowledge on Tuesday, November 30 by:

1) making a plan to donate;
2) sharing your OCW story with us;
3) introducing someone in your life to the rich library of OCW resources.