Opening up Educational Materials to the World: Many Surprising Benefits and Some Unexpected Perils
This event took place on Friday 28 November 2008 at 10:30

Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Shigeru Miyagawa has been at MIT since 1991, where he is Professor of Linguistics and holds the endowed chair, Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture. In linguistics, he has a monograph to be published by MIT Press in 2009, Why Agree? Why Move? Unifying Agreement-based and Discourse-configurational Languages. The book he co-edited with Mamoru Saito, Oxford Handbook of Japanese Linguistics, was published by the Oxford University Press in 2008. Along with other books and monographs, he has nearly fifty articles on syntax, argument structure, and East Asian and Altaic linguistics. He also runs a laboratory that creates interactive educational programs. StarFestival, which looks at issues of growing up in multilingual, multicultural societies, was awarded the Best of Show at the 1997 MacWorld Exposition and the Irwin Sizer Award for the Most Significant Contribution to MIT Education. JP NET, which has the entire MIT Japanese program on the web, was one of the first online projects in the world to place an entire academic program on the Internet (1993-1994). Visualizing Cultures, in collaboration with the Pulitzer Prize historian John W. Dower, has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities as an outstanding humanities educational website. It won the 2004 MIT Class of 1960 Innovation in Education Award. For his work in interactive media, the educational technology magazine Converge chose him as one of twenty national "Shapers of the Future." He was on the original team that proposed OpenCourseWare, and has helped to start opencoursewares in Japan and elsewhere. He serves on the MIT OpenCourseWare Advisory Board. Miyagawa received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Arizona in 1980, and his B.A. from the International Christian University in Tokyo in 1975.