from http://studio.mit.edu/public/about/description/
StudioMIT is a research project in the Department of Architecture
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is funded
by iCampus, a research alliance between MIT and Microsoft
Research to enrich higher education through information technology.
StudioMIT explores a new approach to educational technology
- one that emphasizes creative learning communities. Just
as Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia campus was intended
to bring together and support a community of scholars by architectural
means, we aim to sustain and enhance a community of scholars
by electronic means.
StudioMIT represents a fundamentally new strategy for professional
education in general, and design programs in particular --
a strategy that employs educational technology to build upon
the established strengths of the studio method and the design
community's extensive experience with it. The strengths of
the studio method are its problem-oriented focus, its suitability
for engaging complex ill-defined problems that do not have
straightforwardly right or wrong answers, its emphasis on
creative synthesis, its tradition of subjecting design propositions
to rigorous critical discussion from diverse viewpoints, and
its emphasis on cross-disciplinary collaborative work. It
is in the studio environment that participants find the majority
of the resources they need, the support of a cohesive community
with a sense of identity and purpose, and the opportunities
for collaboration, discussion, and criticism. Our strategy,
then, is to create a rich, robust online environment that
complements the physical studio environment, allows the physical
space and face-to-face interaction to be used most effectively
for the things they do best, and provides valuable means for
developing and maintaining an intense learning communities
among students and faculty.
The main objective of StudioMIT is to design, implement,
and maintain a comprehensive Web-based environment that supports
the community of students, staff, faculty, alumni and prospective
applicants of MIT's studio-centered professional degree programs.
StudioMIT will provide crucial infrastructure for a creative
learning community that produces and accumulates intellectual
products such as architectural designs, digital images, course
curricula, and research papers. More than mere online delivery
of content, the system includes mechanisms for producing,
managing, sharing, and adding value to these intellectual
materials.
The core of the system is an open-ended collection of continually
updated searchable databases. All community members have individual
workspaces which provide them with consistent and personalized
entry points to digital image collections, community and class
workspaces, exhibition spaces, and communication capabilities.
These interactive personal workspaces also allow members to
represent themselves and their work to other members of the
community. In addition, there are extensive facilities to
support discussions, individual work, group work, and the
exchange of news allowing distant and local participants to
communicate, collaborate, share resources, and develop their
own community practices and spirit. We anticipate that the
StudioMIT environment will grow in value over time as it captures
and preserves the contributions of faculty and of successive
generations of students and expands and strengthens the MIT
design community.
Currently, the first version of StudioMIT is being tested
by a group of pilot classes and communities in which instructors,
teaching assistants, and students use the site as their primary
web-based location for course lectures, assignment submissions,
and discussions. A subset of these StudioMIT members is accessing
the site from wireless laptops in the design studios and elsewhere
on campus. These laptops, supported by MIT Information Systems,
are the result of a grant from the MIT Council on Educational
Technology (MITCET) and the d'Arbeloff Award for Excellence
in Education to explore the use of the wireless infrastructure.
We expect to see many advantages from using the wireless laptops
as a predominant delivery point of StudioMIT as students access
design resources and their own design work wherever and whenever
is most appropriate - in class, in studio, in lab, in the
café, in the dorms, or on a design site. Also as part
of StudioMIT and in collaboration with Lili Cheng and the
Social Computing Group (SCG) at Microsoft Research (MSR),
we are developing a joint research project, StudioBridge.
StudioBridge is a software application that focuses on social
interactions within the MIT Architecture community. We plan
to deploy the system on the wireless laptops in Spring 2002.
See "Related Projects" for a description of the
Wireless Laptop Project and StudioBridge.
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