Chalk Radio
38 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 year ago -Chalk Radio is an MIT OpenCourseWare podcast about inspired teaching at MIT. We take you behind the scenes of some of the most interesting courses on campus to talk with the professors who make those courses possible.
Our guests 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 right here with us in person under the MIT dome, talking with your favorite professors.
And because each of our guests shares teaching materials on OCW, it's easy to take a deeper dive into the topics that inspire you. If you're an educator, you can make these teaching materials your own because they're all openly-licensed.
Hosted by Dr. Sarah Hansen from MIT Open Learning.
Chalk Radio episodes are offered under a CC BY-NC-SA license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/).
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Episodes
Honoring Your Native Language with Prof. Michel DeGraff
April 18, 2023 09:00 - 25 minutes - 23.6 MBWe first interviewed Professor Michel DeGraff back in season 1; he now returns for another episode, diving deeper into issues of culture and identity. He talks about his childhood in Haiti, where he was punished at school for speaking his own mother tongue, and where he was taught by his teachers and even his parents that Kreyòl was not “a real language.” After doing early work in natural language processing that led him to question widespread assumptions about language, Prof. DeGraff shifte...
Sustainability Education Across Learning Environments with Dr. Liz Potter-Nelson and Sarah Meyers
April 05, 2023 09:00 - 15 minutes - 13.9 MBMany people associate the word “sustainability” with a few specific activities such as composting or recycling. Our guests for this episode, Dr. Liz Potter-Nelson and Sarah Meyers, point out that sustainability is actually much broader, encompassing all the future-oriented practices that promote the continued flourishing of individuals, cultures, and life on earth. Dr. Potter-Nelson and Meyers have sought not only to make education a tool for sustainability but to make it a sustainable activ...
Teaching Teachers with Dr. Summer Morrill
March 22, 2023 09:00 - 18 minutes - 17.1 MBNobody comes into this world already knowing how to teach—and most students arrive at undergraduate or graduate programs without any teaching experience at all. For those who are selected to be teaching assistants, the prospect of facing a classroom of students for the first time can be terrifying. To assuage those fears and provide pedagogical skills, the Biology department at MIT runs a training program for new TAs; our guest Dr. Summer Morrill helped develop the curriculum for that progra...
Communication is the Whole Game with Paige Bright & Prof. Haynes Miller
March 08, 2023 10:00 - 19 minutes - 17.8 MBIn this episode we meet Haynes Miller, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, who in his 35+ years of active teaching at MIT has done much to shape the institute’s math curriculum. Prof. Miller’s special focus is algebraic topology, but his teaching has encompassed a wide range of other topics from differential equations to number theory, and he has a special interest in teaching undergraduates. Join us as Prof. Miller discusses math education with guest host Paige Bright, a current MIT third-ye...
Opening Computer Science to Everyone with Chancellor Eric Grimson
February 22, 2023 10:00 - 16 minutes - 15.3 MBEric Grimson is MIT’s chancellor for academic advancement and interim vice president for Open Learning; he’s also a longstanding professor of computer science and medical engineering. In this episode, Prof. Grimson shares his thoughts on in-person and online education. We learn that he rehearses each lecture one, two, or even three times before coming to the classroom, and that he often pauses in his speech when lecturing to avoid distracting his students with “um”s and “ah”s and similar dis...
Seeing Green with Drs. Sandland and Chazot
February 08, 2023 10:00 - 17 minutes - 16.3 MBMIT has long been an innovator in online education. For even longer—for its whole history, in fact—it has championed hands-on learning. These two emphases may seem incompatible, but the MICRO initiative draws on both in an effort to increase diversity within the field of materials science. Dr. Jessica Sandland and Dr. Cécile Chazot, our guests for this episode, describe how MICRO recruits undergraduates from minoritized backgrounds to do impactful research remotely in collaboration with MIT ...
Well-being is the Goal with Prof. Frank Schilbach
January 25, 2023 10:00 - 16 minutes - 15.4 MBDo you always make the best possible choices, even when you’re stressed or short on sleep? The ideally rational person (“Homo economicus”) assumed by conventional economics always acts in ways that are materially advantageous to them. But Associate Professor Frank Schilbach seeks in his research and teaching to explore the ways in which Homo economicus fails as a model of actual human behavior; in particular, Prof. Schilbach is interested in uncovering the psychological factors that influenc...
The Greatest Existential Threat with Prof. Robert Redwine and Dr. Jim Walsh
January 11, 2023 10:00 - 15 minutes - 14.5 MBTo most people, especially those who are too young to remember the Cold War, the possibility of nuclear Armageddon may seem so remote as not to be worth contemplating. But Prof. Bob Redwine and Jim Walsh, two of the instructors behind MIT’s Nuclear Weapons Education Project (NWEP), warn that it may not be so unlikely after all, and that failure to take the threat of nuclear war seriously makes it more likely that it will actually occur. Redwine, Walsh, and their colleagues used their experti...
Visualizing Calculus with Professor Gigliola Staffilani
June 30, 2022 09:00 - 13 minutes - 12.5 MBProfessor Gigliola Staffilani, who teaches in MIT’s Department of Mathematics, was closely involved in designing and teaching the introductory-level 18.01 Calculus I course series now found on the MIT Open Learning Library. She’s also been involved in teaching calculus to students on campus. To help students become proficient in a notoriously intimidating subject, she has tried to design learning experiences that bridge the gap between the pure abstractions that mathematicians love, exemplif...
Finding Expertise Everywhere with Prof. M. Amah Edoh
April 27, 2022 09:00 - 18 minutes - 17.1 MBThough there’s widespread consensus that the slavery and colonization that characterize the history of European relations with Africa represent a legacy of grave injustice, there is much less agreement on how to redress that injustice. Professor M. Amah Edoh, who teaches in MIT’s Department of Anthropology, designed the course 21A.S01 Reparations for Slavery and Colonization with the goal of honestly facing the historical record and openly discussing how best to respond. Because she believes...
AI Literacy for All with Prof. Cynthia Breazeal
March 30, 2022 09:00 - 21 minutes - 19.3 MBWhen humans interact, they don’t just pass information from one to the other; there’s always some relational element, with the participants responding to each other’s emotional cues. Professor Cynthia Breazeal, MIT’s new Dean of Digital Learning, believes it’s possible to design this element into human-computer interactions as well. She foresees a day when AI won’t merely perform practical tasks for us, but also will provide us with companionship, emotional comfort, and even mental health su...
Making Ethical Decisions in Software Design with Prof. Daniel Jackson & Serena Booth
February 23, 2022 10:00 - 21 minutes - 19.8 MBIn the previous episode we learned about a project undertaken as part of the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) initiative at MIT’s Schwartzman College of Computing. In this episode we hear about another SERC project, from Prof. Daniel Jackson and graduate teaching assistant Serena Booth, who have partnered to incorporate ethical considerations in Prof. Jackson and Prof. Arvind Satyanarayan’s course 6.170 Software Studio. Jackson and Booth explain that software can fail ...
The Human Element in Machine Learning with Prof. Catherine D’Ignazio, Prof. Jacob Andreas & Harini Suresh
January 26, 2022 10:00 - 16 minutes - 14.7 MBWhen computer science was in its infancy, programmers quickly realized that though computers are astonishingly powerful tools, the results they achieve are only as good as the data you feed into them. (This principle was quickly formalized as GIGO: “Garbage In, Garbage Out.”) What was true in the era of the UNIVAC has proved still to be true in the era of machine learning: among other well-publicized AI fiascos, chatbots that have interacted with bigots have learned to spew racist invective,...
When There Isn't A Simple Answer with Prof. Dennis McLaughlin
January 12, 2022 10:00 - 15 minutes - 13.9 MBMost of the students in Professor Dennis McLaughlin’s course 1.74 Land, Water, Food, and Climate come to it with established opinions on some very controversial topics: whether GMOs are safe, whether climate change is real (and really human-induced), whether organic agriculture is preferable to conventional agriculture, and whether it’s better for land to be worked by individual farmers or by larger corporations. Dealing with topics like these in an introductory graduate-level class can be c...
Learning about Life through Laboratory Chemistry with Drs. John Dolhun & Sarah Hewett
December 15, 2021 10:00 - 16 minutes - 15.5 MBStudents in MIT’s course 5.310 Laboratory Chemistry have a state-of-the art lab to work in, with energy-saving hibernating fume hoods and a new spectrometer that achieves mind-blowingly precise measurements—not parts per million or parts per billion, but parts per trillion! And the students do spend much of their time in that new lab. But Dr. John Dolhun, director of the Undergraduate Chemistry Teaching Labs at MIT, who taught 5.310 for many years, and Dr. Sarah Hewett, who currently teaches...
Re-engineering Education with VP for Open Learning Sanjay Sarma
December 01, 2021 10:00 - 12 minutes - 11.3 MBSanjay Sarma is not only a professor of mechanical engineering; he’s also Vice President for Open Learning at MIT, where he oversees innovative efforts to reimagine education, and he is coauthor (with Luke Yoquinto) of the recent book Grasp, which explores the nature of learning. In this episode, Professor Sarma discusses the differences between nominal learning, in which you memorize a fact or procedure but soon forget it, and real learning, in which you can effectively apply the skills and...
Sketching a Picture of the Mind with Prof. Nancy Kanwisher
November 17, 2021 11:27 - 18 minutes - 17 MBNancy Kanwisher, founding member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, describes the effort to understand the mind as “the grandest scientific quest of all time,” partly because it seeks to answer fundamental questions that all people ponder from time to time: What is knowledge? How does memory work? How do we form our perceptions of the world? In this episode, Prof. Kanwisher gives a nutshell history of her field and ...
Prof. Edoh Wants to Know What You Think
October 25, 2021 07:00 - 2 minutes - 1.86 MBContemporary Movements for Justice is an MIT course in which scholars and activists speak about pursuing justice for European colonialism in Africa and its contemporary legacies. Do you have ideas that could help shape these discussions? If so, please participate in this new OCW opportunity. Watch course lectures online at the same time as MIT students. No registration required, and it’s completely free. Then share your ideas by following the link below. Professor Edoh will incorporate you...
Building Our Muscle for Democracy (Prof. Ceasar McDowell)
June 03, 2021 09:00 - 31 minutes - 28.5 MBThe classic New England town meeting, with voters gathered in a large hall to decide issues directly, is often cited as the purest form of American democracy. But historically, those town meetings gave a voice only to certain classes of people. In this episode we meet Ceasar McDowell, Professor of the Practice of Community Development at MIT and newly appointed associate director of MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication. Prof. McDowell has devoted his career to nurturing a more vibrant...
In Climate Conversations, Empathy is Everything (Brandon Leshchinskiy)
March 31, 2021 09:00 - 21 minutes - 19.5 MBIn our previous episode we met Professor Dava Newman, cofounder of the nonprofit group EarthDNA. Today’s guest is Brandon Leshchinskiy, a graduate student in Technology and Policy at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, who has helped Prof. Newman create the EarthDNA Ambassadors program, training young people in communication, negotiation, and storytelling to build support for individual and collective action on climate change. Leshchinskiy has crafted an engaging interactive pres...
Visualizing the Future of Spaceship Earth (Prof. Dava Newman)
March 03, 2021 10:00 - 15 minutes - 13.7 MBProfessor Dava Newman is an aerospace engineer whose career has largely focused on developing improved space suits for eventual interplanetary travel. But in recent years she has turned her sights back toward Earth, using the vast amounts of data collected by satellites in near space to inform and motivate the public for the fight against catastrophic climate change. In this episode, Prof. Newman fields listener-submitted questions about climate change and also talks more specifically about ...
Encountering Each Other (Essayist Garnette Cadogan)
February 17, 2021 10:00 - 22 minutes - 20.9 MBGarnette Cadogan is an acclaimed essayist who teaches in MIT’s Urban Studies and Planning program. As befits a teacher who is also a professional creative writer, he conceives of the academic syllabus as a matrix of interconnected and recurring themes and leitmotifs, not as a schematic outline of self-contained units. In this episode, he describes how he designed his latest class, 11.S947 The Fire This Time: Race and Racism in American Cities, to draw on a wide range of cultural documents—no...
Seeing the Big Picture from Space (Astronaut Jeff Hoffman)
January 27, 2021 10:00 - 19 minutes - 18 MBOver the years, Sarah Hansen has interviewed the creator of the “Women of NASA” minifigure series as well as a professor of astronautics and former deputy administrator of NASA. Now, for the first time, she interviews an actual astronaut, Jeff Hoffman, who teaches aerospace engineering and systems engineering at MIT. In this episode, Prof. Hoffman describes his experiences in space and how one’s understanding of the world is changed by seeing it from the outside, as a finite sphere, with our...
Making Solid State Chemistry Matter (Prof. Jeffrey Grossman)
December 02, 2020 10:00 - 11 minutes - 10.9 MBFirst-year students who already plan to major in chemistry don’t require any special bells or whistles to motivate them to study the subject. But introductory chemistry is a required subject for all students at MIT, regardless of their intended major, and materials scientist Jeffrey Grossman has found that for many students in his course 3.091 Introduction to Solid State Chemistry, the subject becomes much more accessible if he takes conscious steps to make it real for them. He does this bot...
Searching for the Oldest Stars (Prof. Anna Frebel)
November 11, 2020 12:00 - 15 minutes - 14.2 MBFor millions of years after the Big Bang, nearly all the matter in the universe was in the form of hydrogen and helium; other elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen only formed later, in nuclear reactions inside stars. To learn what the universe looked like back then, MIT astrophysicist Anna Frebel studies the oldest stars we can find—13 billion years old, to be precise—scanning them for traces of elements that will give a clue to their history. As Professor Frebel explains to Sarah Hans...
Paying it Forward with FinTech (Prof. Gary Gensler)
October 28, 2020 09:00 - 16 minutes - 14.7 MBOne might imagine that an expert on financial technology would view human relations through a primarily transactional lens. But Professor Gary Gensler, in teaching his course on financial technology (or “FinTech”) at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, tries to base his interactions with his students on a different model. Feeling indebted to the older mentors who helped and supported him in his student days and his early career, he seeks to repay that debt by nurturing his own students’ intell...
The Power of OER with Profs. Mary Rowe and Elizabeth Siler
July 15, 2020 09:00 - 17 minutes - 16.7 MBMany instructors in recent years have turned to open educational resources (OER) so that their students don’t have to pay for an expensive textbook. And that is indeed one of the foremost benefits of OER. But Professor Elizabeth Siler, who teaches at Worcester State University, has found that using OER offers advantages to instructors too: doing so allows you to teach the material you think your students need to learn, and to teach that material the way you think your students need to learn ...
Thinking Like an Economist with Prof. Jonathan Gruber
June 24, 2020 09:00 - 10 minutes - 9.84 MBProfessor Jonathan Gruber wants to train students to think like economists. Economics uses elegant mathematical models to explain how people make decisions and allocate their resources—but all too often those models are taught in ways that remain disconnected from students’ own experience. In this episode, Professor Gruber shares his thoughts on bridging that gap in his course 14.01 Introductory Microeconomics. He says he tries to anchor the course with real-world examples; as he explains, “...
Learning to Fly with Drs. Philip Greenspun & Tina Srivastava
June 10, 2020 09:00 - 16 minutes - 15.5 MBCan you really learn to fly by sitting in a classroom and attending lectures? Of course not! But the course offered by Philip Greenspun and Tina Srivastava in 16.687 Private Pilot Ground School has proven surprisingly popular as a means of learning the basic principles one needs to know before getting into the cockpit of a small aircraft. Originally offered in weekly class sessions over the course of a semester, 16.687 has evolved over the years; it now takes the form of an immersive three-d...
Unpacking Misconceptions about Language & Identities with Prof. Michel DeGraff
May 27, 2020 09:00 - 11 minutes - 11.1 MB“We all hold dear certain attitudes about language,” Professor Michel DeGraff says in this episode centered on his course 24.908 Creole Languages and Caribbean Identities. Those attitudes can be positive for ourselves and for others, DeGraff says, but they can also have negative effects. His goal is to make linguistics accessible to a broader audience, to connect language to issues of culture and identity, and to show how language prejudices are rooted in hierarchies of power. Specifically, ...
Special Episode: Teaching Remotely During Covid-19 with Prof. Justin Reich
May 13, 2020 09:00 - 17 minutes - 16.4 MBJoin us as we talk with Justin Reich, assistant professor in comparative media studies at MIT. Professor Reich runs the Teaching Systems Lab, which was founded with the mission of designing, implementing, and researching the future of teacher learning. With the emergence of the current coronavirus pandemic, Prof. Reich has been turning his attention to helping teachers and education policy makers figure out how to transition rapidly to remote learning. In this special episode of Chalk Radio,...
Hands-on, Minds On with Dr. Christopher Terman
April 29, 2020 09:00 - 17 minutes - 16.1 MBYou might imagine that fluency is an inherently good thing in teaching. But Dr. Christopher Terman, Senior Lecturer Emeritus at MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab, explains that breaks in the flow of the classroom can actually make the learning experience more memorable. This is just one of the insights Dr. Terman has gained in twenty years of teaching the course 6.004 Computation Structures. “If you’re going to spend 40% of your time in the classroom,” he says, “you might ...
Film Is for Everyone with Prof. David Thorburn
April 15, 2020 09:00 - 16 minutes - 15.6 MBWhat would Shakespeare have made of today’s popular television shows? He might or might not like them, but he wouldn’t dismiss them simply because they’re popular. In this episode, Professor David Thorburn, who has spent his career challenging conventional assumptions about what kinds of works have artistic merit, speaks eloquently about why popular art forms like film and television belong in the classroom. He explains that in his course 21L.011 The Film Experience, which he has taught at M...
Social Impact at Scale, One Project at a Time with Dr. Anjali Sastry
April 01, 2020 09:00 - 10 minutes - 10.3 MBThis episode explores a new kind of independent study. MIT has traditionally encouraged its Sloan MBA fellows to engage in international projects with partners around the globe. Our guest, Dr. Anjali Sastry, has led over 100 groups of MBA fellows in these projects. But she recently changed the structure of the class so that instead of signing on to projects developed by instructors, students are now able to develop their own projects based on their own interests. All the new projects in this...
Making Deep Learning Human with Prof. Gilbert Strang
March 18, 2020 09:00 - 10 minutes - 10.2 MBMathematics Professor Gilbert Strang is one of MIT’s most revered instructors; his courses, especially the perennially popular linear algebra course 18.06, have received millions of visits on OpenCourseWare, and his lecture videos have won him a devoted following on YouTube as well. (A sample YouTube comment on one of his lectures: “This is not lecture, this is art.”) A few years ago, Professor Strang began teaching a new course (18.065) focusing on the application of mathematical matrices t...
How Africa Has Been Made to Mean with Prof. Amah Edoh
March 04, 2020 10:00 - 27 minutes - 25.4 MB“How has Africa been made to mean?” For a long time, Africa has been depicted in the arts and media as a place of famine and dysfunction. More recently, the continent has been increasingly portrayed as the next frontier for business and artistic innovation. In this episode, we talk with MIT Professor of African Studies M. Amah Edoh about how Africa, as a concept, is produced through cultural practices--things like music, film, theatre, clothing, etc. She shares how she engages MIT students w...
Nuclear Gets Personal with Prof. Michael Short
February 19, 2020 10:00 - 24 minutes - 22.9 MBIt’s a safe bet that Professor Michael Short’s 22.01 Introduction to Nuclear Engineering and Ionizing Radiation is the only course at MIT where students are encouraged to bring their toenail clippings to class. In this episode, Professor Short discusses one of the core principles of his teaching philosophy: the importance of making abstract concepts tangible by means of hands-on activities. Want to know how much gold or arsenic is in your body? Bombard the aforementioned toenail clippings wi...
Coming Soon: Chalk Radio from MIT OCW
February 01, 2020 15:50 - 1 minute - 1.38 MBIn each episode of this new podcast, we meet the instructors behind one of MIT’s most interesting courses, from nuclear physics to film appreciation to piloting small aircraft. The instructors 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 right here with us in person under the MIT dome, talking with your favorit...