MIT

According to the Wikipedia entry for Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), it has an impressive history of spawning progressive educational and open technologies, inclduing the Lisp programming language that gave rise to Logo, the X Window System, the GNU Project and the OLPC initiative.

 

A number of recent projects are presented on their Educational Transformation through Technology at MIT page.

• OpenCourseWare, course material available on the web to anyone in the world free of charge, is perhaps their most famous contribution to open learning.  It is heartening to note that their 1999 faculty committee felt "convinced that open software and open systems were the wave of the future".  Did they really mean "wave" and not "way"?  I don't like the implication that a wave is something that passes by and disappears.  But I guess, nothing lasts forever.
• iMOAT is an online assessment tool to replace the arcane practice of herding students into rows of desks to write essays by hand.  Has it really been 100 years of industrial assessment?
• Technology-Enhanced Active Learning (TEAL) is learning by peer instruction/support in small groups, with a computer.  Not exactly radical but worthy of note.

MIT is committed to "hands-on learning" and so might be interested in my crazy ideas.