MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

EECS faculty asked for ideas for the new MIT EVAT committee

October 26, 1994

Memorandum

October 26, 1994, 11:35 PM
From: Paul Penfield, Jr.
To: EECS Faculty
Subject: New Ad hoc Committee

Recently there has been a lot of grass-roots interest in EECS and more generally at MIT in the use of advanced technologies to aid our educational mission. On September 19 an off-campus retreat was held to discuss this. The emphasis was on hypertext, CD-ROMs, hypermedia, multimedia, and the world-wide web. This meeting was organized by Dick Larson. People from several parts of MIT were present.

Members of the Academic Council, upon hearing about this retreat at a meeting on October 11, and recalling earlier discussions of the topic, took a renewed interest. President Vest asked Dean of Engineering Joel Moses to form an ad hoc committee to recommend courses of action for MIT. I have been asked to chair this committee. There are eight other members: Hal Abelson, EECS; Peter Donaldson, Literature; Greg Jackson, Information Systems; Bob Jaffe, Physics (and Chair of the Faculty); Chris Kemerer, Sloan School; Dick Larson, EECS; Bill Mitchell, Dean of Architecture and Planning; and Tony Patera, Mechanical Engineering.

This committee has chosen to call itself the committee on Education Via Advanced Technologies, or EVAT. Please don't tell me that you could have thought of a better name.

I know many of you have an interest in these kinds of technologies. They seem to be well suited for some aspects of teaching, and poorly suited for others. The committee will try to understand these issues and recommend a responsible course of action for MIT to follow. We hope to report and disband by the end of the semester.

We would welcome ideas from the faculty and others. Please feel free to contact me or any other member of the committee, especially if you are using any of these technologies in your teaching today, or have plans or hopes to do so.

To facilitate communication with the MIT (and external) community, the committee has established a new e-mail address evat@mit.edu for comments, a news group evat.mit for general discussion, and a world-wide web home page with URL http://www-evat.mit.edu/ describing the committee and its work.