Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [63]
The Lab’s primary source of funding comes from more than 60 corporations whose businesses range from electronics to entertainment, furniture to finance, and toys to telecommunications. Sponsorship provides a unique opportunity for corporations to have access to a valuable resource for conducting research that is too costly or too “far out” to be accommodated within a corporate environment. It is also an opportunity for corporations to bring their business challenges and concerns to the Lab to see the solutions our researchers present.
There are three levels of membership, ranging from $75,000 to $400,000 for a minimum of three years. The benefits to corporations include Lab visiting privileges and advisory meetings with faculty and students as well as nonexclusive, license-fee-free, royalty-free licensing rights for intellectual property.
Over the years, faculty members, students and sponsors have collaborated to introduce a broad array of products, ranging from children’s toys and video games to educational programs and robotic devices for industrial use, monitoring children and the elderly and even space exploration. The Lab also has created important new technologies for the communications and computer industries. Researchers developed a new Wi-Fi (i.e., wireless technology) for Nortel as well as a new search engine for IBM designed to collect and organize information from blogs, bulletin boards, newsgroups and non-Web sources like newspapers, databases and journals. Other people at the Lab are exploring ways that computers and digital devices can be used to help people who suffer physical and mental disabilities. In 2007, the Lab held a symposium entitled “New Minds, New Bodies, New Identities.” Neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, writer Michael Chorost and architect Michael Graves joined Lab faculty and students to consider how the merging of technology with bodies and minds is transforming our understanding of life and recasting the boundaries of human beings. This kind of collaboration could contribute to courses in new Emerging Zones.
Under the leadership of founding director Nicholas Negroponte, the Media Lab has undertaken an ambitious educational program. The one-laptop-per-child initiative aims to distribute low-cost computers to poor children throughout the world. A recent article in The Economist reports that 370,000 children in Nicaragua have received computers through this initiative. The Lab also develops and distributes educational materials that can be used on computers. One of the most successful programs for childhood education to date is the Computer Clubhouse, a worldwide network for after-school learning centers that focuses on young people in disadvantaged areas. Finally, longtime faculty member Mitch Resnick and his students are working with LEGO’s electronics research and development department to develop a robotics construction set that teaches children how to use software to design different devices. Resnick reports that his lab also allows children to use a “free Scratch programming system4 to create stories that combine on-screen animations with WeDo constructions, allowing them to integrate virtual and physical worlds and share their stories with other children around the globe.”
These partnerships between universities and companies suggest the growing range of opportunities such arrangements provide. While still in college and graduate school, students have the chance to do original research, and at the same time