Technology has now become relevant to education after first having been a key issue to industrial development and then to company management. How is MIT adapting to this as an educational institution that is also leading technological development?

Vijay Kumar: There has been a very significant shift in attention toward thinking about learning as different from just teaching, and we see the application of technology as reflecting that shift. The consideration of technology for education is coming through hardware, through software tools, and through enabling different kind of spaces.


On one hand, there are tablet PCs, PDAs, and even personal response systems. Visualisation and simulation can be used for better understanding concepts in physics and chemistry, just as images and additive media can be used in understanding cultures and languages. By means of shared whiteboards and laboratories that can be remotely accessed, students cannot only collaborate by presenting, but they can take control of the resources.


We work with these technologies because we want a systematic understanding of the impact of technological development for promoting different kinds of educational programs that we feel are important: active learning, collaboration, visualisation, and simulation.

Those shared whiteboards - is there any virtual reality involved?

Vijay Kumar: That particular thing is not virtual reality; it is actually a shared computational space. We do have computational three-dimensional visualisation in a variety of fields including chemistry, planetary sciences, biology, but those are not interactive environments. On the other hand, for instance, in visualization environments such as -œcaves-, by wearing the three-dimensional goggles and haptic gloves, you can actually go inside a molecule, see the atoms inside, go and grab two of them, and the pull them apart and feel what the forces are.

Can you imagine how I will experience what I typically understand only by observation? We are beginning to experiment, and I want to use the word experiment because we do not know all the implications of things like Second Life - virtual worlds where we are enquiring whether there are ways to exploit them to enrich students' entire learning experience?

Open standards and sources together with open content as with the Creative Commons initiative or the example of Wikipedia - how do they meet in open education?

Vijay Kumar: There are self-learners, educators, and also students in formal education who are using open content. MIT launched its Open Course Ware project a little more than six years ago and is now delivering the content of 1,800 courses - all of which will be on the Web for free! As iLabs shows, with our labs being available over the Internet, even laboratory experiences can be made available at a distance for the whole education experience. So this is not just about content and course materials but increasingly also about software tools. Where do open technology, open source, and open standards play a role?


The thing is that many of these initiatives are created using different technologies. One, you want the user not to have to suffer the consequences of these having being built in different technologies, and two, you do not want to force the people who are developing them to pick any particular technology.


This means, you want choice on one hand and flexibility on the other. Open standards-based implementations link choice and flexibility. And you can also innovate; that is the other thing. You want to leave room here so that things can be used as springboards for innovation.


Many of these notions regarding Open Education have been put together in a book -˜Opening Up Education - The Collecting Advancement of Education through Open Content, Open Knowledge and Open Technology', to be published by MIT Press, which my colleague Toru Iyoshi (from the Carnegie Foundation) and I are compiling. The idea of all these open things is that education can be open to opportunity.

How are governments responding to this worldwide?

Vijay Kumar: A year ago it was the OECD meeting here in Barcelona. What were they talking about? Open education. I gave a presentation based on my work with India's National Knowledge Commission - my colleagues from OCW at MIT were also here. The OECD is looking at the worldwide impact of open education because various countries are implementing open and distance education to meet the ambitious goals for extensive access and quality education.

Universities from China are members of the OCW Consortium, as are schools from Japan, South Africa, and several other countries including Spain and Portugal. The important thing is that whether you are talking about educational institutions changing their curriculum and practices, or whether you are talking about nations thinking about national development, open technology has become part of the main conversation.

In addition to educational technologies, which other exciting tools is MIT developing that we might see in the near future in areas such as medical assistance, entertainment, or communications?

Vijay Kumar: There is work on some of the things that you see in terms of technologies that come out of the World Wide Web Consortium like web 2.0, semantic webs, wireless technology, and the convergence with hand-held devices that will increase communication possibilities.

We have Magic Ink, a software application started a couple of years ago by a professor of Computer Science, looking at how sketches - on tablet PCs for instance or whiteboards - could be interpreted and also fed into formal programs. Recently the MIT Museum has opened an additional floor for the season where they have demonstrated the Smart Car project. It can be seen there how the car it is tuned environmentally and how it both acts as a capacitor for electricity and can be folded up.

MIT is also focusing a lot on energy as well as on the marriage of life sciences and engineering. By using nanotechnology, targeted treatment can be delivered extremely focused. MIT has also engaged in the area of DNA sequencing. There are many implications when you start thinking about the impact of bio, nano, and info technologies.

What do you mean by -œsustainable ecology of educational systems-?

Vijay Kumar: For instance, I did research work introducing technological innovations for education in developing countries. I went to schools in Africa, and we tried to understand the impact of small electronic devices (Speak and Spell, Microcomputers) on literacy. A sustainable solution is that which will stay after the original sponsors leave and beyond the original adopters. What do I mean by sustainable ecology? In the education ground, there are students, there are teachers, there are politicians, there is infrastructure, and they have to work together in order to deliver an end-to-end solution.

Industry and commercial solutions also have to be considered, so, the ecology has many players, diverse players. How you connect them up to deliver solutions that can be run and managed, over time - that is what I mean by a sustainable ecology. It means recognising that at different points in time there will be different players, there will be different technologies, and there will be different educational priorities.