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EdX President Anant Agarwal’s Plan to Change the World

Note: this interview was broadcast by the WGBH affiliate WCAI, the Cape and Islands NPR station and by KPIP in Missouri.

You’ve heard the news. Online education is the next big, disruptive thing. It’s taking on the establishment, and the hidebound, bricks and mortar institutions of higher learning must change – or shrink.

EdX, Coursera, Udacity and the like are the future – promising us a better educated and better employed nation of newly empowered citizens.

Or — they’re the tool that leads to the firing of second rate, redundant professors across the land, to the retreat of non-virtual classrooms, those sacrosanct spaces where real students interact with real professors.

Or perhaps they’re both? These cultural and marketplace issues will work themselves out over time. But if we look farther ahead, what will be the political impact of “free education for all,” across the globe? (Albeit for those with a high speed internet connection!)

Anant Agarwal

ThoughtCast spoke with Anant Agarwal, formerly the Director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and currently the very first President of edX, in their spanking new offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An entrepreneur and an intellectual, Anant is perhaps also a visionary.

Will his visions for edX come true? Take a listen, and judge for yourself!

Click here: (12 minutes).

Also, for extra credit —
What does the “X” in edX stand for?
Click here: (1 minute).

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Posted on July 8, 2013 in Ideas, Internet, MIT, Public Media
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20 Rescued Bear Cubs Nursed Back to Health

Note: This interview and slideshow with Phoebe Kilham is featured on New Hampshire Public Radio Online.

Phoebe Kilham is the soft-spoken younger sister of Ben Kilham, the renowned black bear behavioralist and bear cub rehabilitator, based in Lyme New Hampshire. But he couldn’t do this work without her, or the support of his wife, Debbie.
Phoebe’s dogged determination, every day, to care for and feed these motherless cubs is the essential act that creates for these sad orphans a safe new world they can explore, and come to trust.

Last spring, the Kilhams were inundated by 20 bear cubs, far more than the usual handful, and it became their job to nurse them back to health, while still keeping them wild enough to be released once they reach the age of 18 months. (This number was then increased to 27 during the harsh winter that followed.)
Well, that’s a lot of mouths to feed, as Phoebe found out. She spoke with ThoughtCast on Ben and Debbie’s deck, within shouting distance of the bear cub enclosure.

Note: all of the photos in this slideshow were taken by Ben or Phoebe Kilham.

To hear a longer audio version of this ThoughtCast interview with Phoebe Kilham, click here: to listen! (13 minutes).

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Posted on May 20, 2013 in Environment
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How to minimize disasters and manage crises – if possible!

How we respond to natural (and man made) disasters and manage environmental crises has become a subject of intense political debate during this latest round of “worst ever” fires in the state of California. What can we learn now to help prevent these devastating consequences in the future? Will forest thinning and careful town planning down the road make enough of a difference? Will residents be able to escape more easily when fire strikes again – which it inevitably will – if population density in California’s arid, brushy landscapes is not reduced?

This July 2012 Faculty Insight interview with Arnold Howitt, the executive director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, an adjunct lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and an instructor at Harvard Extension School, highlights the challenges of disaster management and emergency response.

Howitt teaches Crisis Management and Emergency Preparedness and Disaster Relief and Recovery at the Extension School, and is also an author and editor of several books, including Managing Crises: Responses to Large-Scale Emergencies. He spoke with Jenny Attiyeh of ThoughtCast about what we’ve learned from large-scale disasters like Hurricane Katrina, and how we can do better next time!

Click here: to listen (7 mins).

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Posted on November 23, 2012 in a new podcast, Economics, Environment, Faculty Insight, Politics
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Louis Menand, John Summers and Dan Aaron take on Dwight MacDonald

Louis Menand Back in the day when Dwight MacDonald was a household name (on the Upper West Side, at least) his critique of “middlebrow” American culture, and its inflated self-regard, singed eyebrows. Today, do his arguments still sting? After listening to three academics discuss MacDonald’s Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, recently released by New York Review Books Classics, the audience at the Harvard Book Store might say ‘yes’. But then they might not agree on what exactly MacDonald’s message is.
The conversation, with New Yorker staff writer and Harvard literature professor Louis Menand, the author and Baffler magazine editor John Summers, and the longtime scholar and critic Daniel Aaron, lasts 30 minutes.

Click here: to listen, and judge for yourself!

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Posted on October 24, 2011 in Harvard Luminaries, Literature
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Is WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange a hero, or a villain?

In this sixth installment of Faculty Insight, produced in partnership with Harvard University Extension School, ThoughtCast speaks with Allan Ryan, the director of intellectual property at Harvard Business School Publishing, a member of the American Bar Association’s Committee on the First Amendment and Media Litigation, and an instructor at Harvard Extension School.

The subject is a sensitive one for journalists: Is Julian Assange one of us? Does WikiLeaks serve a legitimate news-gathering purpose, or is it a dangerous, possibly illegal website that spreads official secrets without due diligence or consideration of the consequences?
Let us know what you think!

Posted on August 14, 2011 in Faculty Insight, Harvard Luminaries, Politics, Public Media
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Talks@Harvard Book Store: Sean Dorrance Kelly

Sean Dorrance Kelly

(photo by Jenny Attiyeh)

Sean Dorrance Kelly, a voluble, high-octane philosopher and Harvard professor, spoke at the Harvard Book Store recently about his latest creation: All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, which he co-wrote with Hubert Dreyfus, another professor of philosophy, this time at Berkeley.

ThoughtCast was there, and made this recording. (28 minutes.)
So take a listen, and let us know what you think!

Posted on August 10, 2011 in Harvard Luminaries, Literature, Philosophy
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