"This is a seminar about making. It’s run out of the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Spring, 2012. We will focus on creating products, services & experiences, broadly defined, for the Harvard Library community. With generous funding provided by Prof. Robert Darnton and the Harvard Library Lab, projects will be deployed in «Test Kitchens» — partner libraries, such as the Loeb and Widener Libraries, that allocate portions of their public space to these experiments."

"Harvard Library has established the Harvard Library Lab in order to create better services for students and faculty and to join with others in fashioning the information society of the future.

By offering infrastructure and financial support for new enterprises, the Lab offers opportunities for individuals to innovate, cooperate across projects, and make original contributions to the way libraries work.

The Lab leverages the entrepreneurial aspirations of people throughout the library system and beyond and promotes projects in all areas of library activity. Proposals from faculty and students anywhere in the university are welcome and the Lab encourages collaboration with MIT."

"What is the Harvard Library Innovation Laboratory?
We are a small group within the Harvard University Library system that implements in software ideas about how libraries can be ever more valuable.

What do you do?
We hack libraries...in the good sense of discovering and delivering more capability and value.

Can you be a little more specific?
We work in three broad areas:
1. We think in public.
2. We build software that demonstrates how libraries can bring yet more value to scholars and researchers.
3. We amplify our effect by eagerly partnering with other groups with similar passions."

"Bibliotheca II, alias “son of Bibliotheca” (last semester’s seminar/studio jointly run by Jeffrey Schnapp & John Palfrey), has now been launched with the help of Ann Whiteside (chief librarian at the Loeb Design Library), Jeff Goldenson (Law Library Innovation Lab), and Ben Brady (GSD). Otherwise known as The Library Test Kitchen or the “library rapid prototyping lab,” it’s being generously funded by the Harvard Library Lab. Questions of every kind are on the table regarding the future of libraries from signage to furniture, policies to experiences. The point is to build stuff: to translate “ah-ha” insights into actual devices, to fabricate the next new online/offline appliance (or at least a plausible iteration of such an appliance). Once these exist, we plan to deploy & test them in partner libraries, such as the Loeb Design, Widener & Fine Arts Libraries, that allocate portions of their public space to experimentation. We’ll be posting our progress to www.librarytestkitchen.org ."

"Malcolm Riddell at China Debate just did a post noting how Harvard University has posted online (for free!) a 37 class course on China.

The 37 lectures were filmed as they were given as part of a course entitled, China: Traditions and Transformations. The course was/is taught by William C. Kirby and Peter K. Bol.  

Here is the course description:

Modern China presents a dual image: a society transforming itself through economic development and social revolution; and the world’s largest and oldest bureaucratic state, coping with longstanding problems of economic and political management. Both images bear the indelible imprint of China’s historical experience, of its patterns of philosophy and religion, and of its social and political thought. These themes are discussed in order to understand China in the modern world and as a great world civilization that developed along lines different from those of the Mediterranean."

"Most elite American colleges are content to spend their vast resources on gilding their palaces of exclusivity. They worry that extending their reach might dilute their brand…Righteousness is easy; generosity is hard. In any event, Harvard's public-relations wizards managed to spin the university's decision to subsidize tuition for families making three times the median household income as a triumph of egalitarianism. The institution could easily use a program designed to help desperately needy students living in political, environmental, & economic turmoil to burnish Harvard's brand.<br />
<br />
If Harvard doesn't seize the opportunity, some other university will. Reshef is the first to tell you that he didn't invent any of the tools that UoPeople employs…<br />
<br />
If colleges with the means to do so don't contribute to the cause, they will at best have betrayed their obligations & their ideals. At worst, they will find themselves curating beautiful museums of a higher-education time gone by."

"I arrived at Harvard from Montreal…[specifics]…It was a pretty cool, fun, & exciting life for a kid…It was a very vibrant place, and young people were really part of the life of the city.<br />
<br />
Then when I went to Harvard, the place was full of these nominally smart, interesting people, all of whom at the age of 18 seemed perfectly happy to live in dormitories & be on a meal plan & live a fully institutional life…<br />
<br />
I spent my first year trying to figure out how to participate in the life of the city in some way, but by the end of my first year I think I gave up because the pull of the university community was so strong and the boundaries were so hard to overcome…<br />
<br />
In Montreal I knew a lot of really interesting people doing interesting things, and there was a lot less of that at Harvard than I would have expected. In retrospect it’s not surprising. At a certain level, an institution like that is going to attract people who are very good at playing by the rules."

"Harvard spent the money [dramatically increased endowment] on many things. But not a dollar went to increasing the number of undergraduates it chose to bless with a Harvard education…<br />
<br />
…the true currency of elite higher education is admissions, not financial aid…<br />
<br />
That's because the real priority of elite higher education, as the receding tide of money has exposed, is the greater glory of elite higher education and the administrators and faculty members who work there. That's where all the money went, and that's where, now that some of the money turns out to have never existed in the first place, it needs to come from…<br />
<br />
An institution truly dedicated to teaching students has natural limits on how much money it needs. At some point, the land and space and professors suffice.<br />
<br />
An institution dedicated to accumulating more money and prestige? There are no limits to those needs. They can never be satisfied."

"I knew I didn't want to do city planning, to play in that bureaucratic world," he continues. "I also knew that if I stayed another semester they would hand me a diploma, and that diploma is going to open a whole lot of doors that I don't want to go through. And I know that I am not real strong, and if I have that key, at some point I'm going to be seduced and want to go through one of those doors. So by not having the diploma, I will remove the temptation. That actually worked out very well, because I was tempted, more than once."

"…another possibility beckons. 3 of her 5 grandchildren attend a progressive Waldorf school in Birmingham, where Boyden came out of retirement briefly to substitute teach. “It was amazing to be in a school that does things right after fighting an uphill battle for years in the public schools, against people who wanted to test, test, test.” Teaching in a Waldorf school is a big commitment…same teacher stays w/ students from 1st through 8th grades."

[via: http://kottke.org/11/06/harvard-dropouts-40-years-later ]

"Justice is one of the most popular courses in Harvard’s history. Nearly one thousand students pack Harvard’s historic Sanders Theatre to hear Professor Sandel talk about justice, equality, democracy, and citizenship. Now it’s your turn to take the same journey in moral reflection that has captivated more than 14,000 students, as Harvard opens its classroom to the world."

[Lots here, but I'm particularly interested in UChicago's *old* approach.] "For years, Chicago’s admissions office emphasized the university’s distinctiveness: one offbeat mailing was a postcard ringed with a coffee stain. Its application has long included imaginative essay prompts, like “If you could balance on a tightrope, over what landscape would you walk? (No net).” This became known as the “Uncommon Application,” in contrast to the Common Application, the standardized form that allows students to apply to any of hundreds of participating colleges.<br />
<br />
That some students wouldn’t like Chicago’s quirky questions was the point. “If understood properly, no given college will appeal to everyone — that wouldn’t be possible,” says Theodore A. O’Neill, the university’s dean of college admissions from 1989 to 2009. “It’s important to signal something true and meaningful about yourself. The more signals, the more honest you’re being, and doing that does limit the applications.”"

"In the fall of 1958 Theodore Kaczynski, a brilliant but vulnerable boy of sixteen, entered Harvard College. There he encountered a prevailing intellectual atmosphere of anti-technological despair. There, also, he was deceived into subjecting himself to a series of purposely brutalizing psychological experiments -- experiments that may have confirmed his still-forming belief in the evil of science. Was the Unabomber born at Harvard? A look inside the files"

"According to Harvard Magazine, final exams are “going the way of the dodo.”<br />
<br />
Last spring, a mere 23 percent of the school’s 1,137 undergraduate courses gave exams, the magazine reports. And a new faculty vote dictates that a professor must actively decide whether or not to give a final within the first week of class — historically, it had always been a given that a class would have a test at the end of its run.<br />
<br />
The impetus behind exam extinction? Among other factors, professors questioned their value as assessment tools and disliked the responsibility of proctoring them.<br />
<br />
The Harvard Crimson reported in April that professors are increasingly being prompted to consider creative final exam alternatives under the school’s new curriculum, adopted in 2009."

"if you were starting a top university today, what would it look like? You would start by gathering very best minds from around world, from every discipline. Since we're living in an age of abundant, not scarce, information, you'd curate lectures carefully, with focus on new & original, rather than offer a course on every possible topic. You'd create a sustainable economic model by focusing on technological rather than physical infrastructure, & by getting people of means to pay for a specialized experience. You'd also construct a robust network so people could access resources whenever & from wherever they like, & you'd give them the tools to collaborate beyond the lecture hall. Why not fulfill the university's millennium-old mission by sharing ideas as freely and as widely as possible?<br />
<br />
If you did all that, well, you'd have TED. …<br />
<br />
unlike fearful old-school colleges, TED is finding that the more open it is, the more it becomes the global education brand of the 21st century"

"Business people with entropic networks were three times more innovative than people with predictable networks. Because they interacted with lots of different folks, they were exposed to a much wider range of ideas and “non-redundant information”. Instead of getting stuck in the rut of conformity—thinking the same tired thoughts as everyone else—they were able to invent startling new concepts...

"Final exams are probably not anybody’s primary concern at the moment, but it is worth noting that the July-August edition of Harvard Magazine reports that many Harvard professors will no longer routinely require final exams.

"Project Zero is an educational research group at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. Project Zero's mission is to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity in the arts, as well as humanistic and scientific disciplines, at the individual and institutional levels."

"There were a few ironies to my Harvard app. My stated purpose in education is to stage a coup to overthrow & topple the current regime. To seek that knowhow from leader of current establishment is, truly, ironic. That irony was never lost to myself & something I questioned often. When I was just graduating from high school I wrote in my journal (those are like blogs with poor readership) that my goal was not to attend Harvard but to become the Harvard of the next generation. There would have been great irony to Harvard issuing a diploma to the force that will one day come to overthrow it." ... "Getting into HGSE program is a life changing event—by any standards—& would have been the primary topic of interest for anyone who got in. Anyone who leads, participates, or engages online would have left a digital footprint of this event. A blog post, a facebook post, a twitter post...there has not been a single mention online by any of the admitted class of their success in getting in."

"In other words, to become more interesting…1. Do fewer structured activities. 2. Spend more time exploring, thinking, and exposing yourself to potentially interesting things. 3. If something catches your attention, use the abundant free time generated by rule 1 to quickly follow up. ... *High school students place too much emphasis on the qualities demonstrated by their activities. In a quest to demonstrate as many good qualities as possible, they end up stressing themselves with unwieldy lists of time-consuming commitments. * Students like Olivia highlight a different approach. They show that that being interesting can go farther than being widely accomplished. With this in mind, they use activities to build their interestingness – not their credentials – and therefore enjoy happier lives. *The research of Linda Caldwell supports a powerful corollary: any student can become more interesting – it’s not an innate trait possessed only by a lucky few."

"Project Zero's mission is to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity in the arts, as well as humanistic and scientific disciplines, at the individual and institutional levels."

"Like the old MIT-Harvard rivalry, there's often a cortical battle for resources between spatial and verbal / visual "picture" thinking. In studies of spatial experts, high levels of spatial expertise were correlated with lower levels of verbal fluency, auditory verbal memory, and visual memory"

"For years, administrators at Harvard University could throw money at anything that tickled their fancy. A new medical school building for $260 million? Sure. A massive, Robert A.M. Stern—designed addition to Harvard Law School? No problem. One of the most sweeping financial aid initiatives ever undertaken? Consider it done.

"the sedulous banality of the rich degrades teaching into a service-class preoccupation whose chief duty is preparing clients for monied careers...If youth is wasted on the young, is teaching wasted on students?"

"...and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared."

"In this powerful, moving, yet also funny speech Jo talks about her time working for Amnesty International, her personal experiences with failure and the power of the imagination to allow us to empathize with others."

"a donation to Harvard is an act of conspicuous consumption by the rich, a bit like buying the watch that doesn't tell time. In other words, the donors benefit, either through a warm glow or perhaps they receive networking opportunities"

profile of Professor John Stilgoe, Harvard professor of the history of landscape