 Pete was on the promotional material for the event and to tell you that Margaret Weigel is from a class of 2002 and she works in digital education. Dan Roy from 07 is widely known for his games for learning projects. Ilya Bedz-Shropko. Bedroshko. Bedroshko is from 2006 and he does big data and consumer research. Eric State in 2015 is now a PhD student at MIT's program in history and anthropology, science, technology, society, or caste. And Chelsea Barabas, class of 2015, is the newly minted advisor to the Media Lab's Digital Currency Initiative. So take your way, guys. Thank you. Oh, gee. Are we going to go in, like, this order? Yes, this order. All right. I have some notes. So please let me know if I'm rambling over. And can you hear me in the back? I'm going to use my outside voice. Excellent. First, thank you, Andrew, and the department for having us all participate. It's really nice to be back. So I'm going to talk a little bit about my life in CMS and afterwards. So I was in the second cohort that ever went through the program. And the program was really still in flux at that point, but it was great. And I think I sort of slipped in before there were more rigorous admissions standards put in place. I came from a graphic design background and I sort of slipped into some earlier classes to audit and insinuated my way in for which I'm very grateful. And my focus was on, of all things, advertising in public space. I think I can say with the measure of confidence that I was one of the first CMSers to really focus on advertising. Ilya and Sam and others have taken it to a higher level since. And I will say that my timing was impeccable being in CMS. So right upon graduation, there was a recession. And out of my cohort, about half of them went into PhD programs. And the other half, of which I was apart, sort of figured out something else to do. And so back when I was in the program, there were two primary faculty. There was Henry and William. And we sort of self-sorted the students to be like Henry people or William people. And Henry got the participatory culture and fan fiction types. And William did the more historical people. And since I did my pieces on neon signs in New York at the turn of the century, New York, you can figure whose person I was. But in 2005, Henry had gotten a grant from the MacArthur Foundation on digital learning. And again, I somehow sneak myself into the role of project manager there. And so all of a sudden, I was on Team William and Team Henry. And I think the reason I was even considered was because my ties to the department and what Henry knew about me. And the project itself, Project New Media and Literacies, was essentially a startup within MIT in the literature department, which is kind of funny when you think about it. And I can say with confidence that we sort of didn't know what we were doing. And it was a blast. It was really fun to sort of figure out, really, from the ground up what we were doing. And there were a lot of hair pulling and anxiousness and sleepless nights and snits. But at the end of the day, it was really fun and we did something really worthwhile. And I wouldn't trade it for anything. So there's something to be said for just throwing yourself into things and figuring it out. And since then, I went on to work at Harvard's Project Zero with Howard Gardner. He's the, you may have heard of him. He's one of the people who probably, no, the sole person who started multiple intelligences and challenging the idea that there was IQ and one single way of thinking of people as being smart or not. Since then, I've also worked in, what does it say here? I have to check, academic publishers. And I've most recently been working with an education services firm, which means that we bid out for clients and we do a whole range of work from K-12 to higher ed. And sometimes it's professional development and sometimes it's a little app for a second grader and everything else in between. And it's funny on this panel now because about three weeks ago, I was laid off from that job, but I honestly think that I am fine. It's actually, Boston is a wonderful city to be in educational technology. There's so many opportunities out there. And I already have work in the pipeline and I'm talking about, and I was telling Dan that, you know, my big decision now is now like, oh my God, not what am I gonna do, but how am I gonna do what am I gonna do? Because I could contract, I could get another job. I don't really know yet. I have to sort of figure it out. And so, just to sum up, I think that my current position now and what I know is not necessarily per se a result of my CMS education, but it's a directly a result of working with Henry and the faith that he put in me in that role. And that was because of my involvement with CMS. So, I just also wanna say that I still love William, but I'm on both team Henry and William now. Thank you. It's not like we had a nasty divorce. I don't think I've seen Henry and William in the same room in a while, so. That's right, right. Excellent point. Yeah, I ran into Henry the other day. I wasn't sure if you were covertly here or not. I'm so glad you came tonight because I'm definitely team Henry. Take that William. I know I love William too. I know, but Henry was on my thesis committee and passed me despite my thesis, so thank you. So, I'm in learning games and that's why I came to this program because there was a research group here called the Education Arcade. Actually, there is a research group here called the Education Arcade. When I first sort of learned about this team of people in this line of research, it was a few years before that. In 2002, it was called Games to Teach, funded by Microsoft and directed by Kurt Squire, who's now over at Madison. So, I worked a little bit with Kurt and Philip Tan, who's still here. He runs the games lab. And Matt Weiss, who's a previous alum on a game to teach history called Revolution. And then that was when I was still in undergrad at UMass Amherst. And then I came here to work with the Education Arcade and at that point, Games to Teach had sort of stopped. We had a new funding source. Tried to reimagine it a little bit. And we coincidentally got a funding for a project called Lure of the Labyrinth, which was a game to teach math and reading to middle school students, especially at risk or disadvantaged kids. And that was great. That was transformative in every possible way. And for me, that was really the defining aspect of coming here versus going anywhere else. One of my frustrations with school in general is I feel like it's practice. And practice makes me impatient. I just wanna do something real. And Lure of the Labyrinth was this project that was real. It had real money. It had a real development shop supporting our design efforts. It had real students. And so all of that was extra motivating to add all the polish to the design possible. And we had a wonderful time working on that. And then I continued working with that group, the Education Arcade after graduation. And eventually the folks who run that spun off a nonprofit called the Learning Games Network. And I've been working with that nonprofit actually to this day. So I'm still connected. And my work is a direct outcropping of the relationships and the research that I did while I was a student here. So absolutely transformative for my career, my professional development. I will say one aspect that I'm trying to build upon or improve upon from my time here is the research projects were grant funded and usually grants would have money specifically earmarked for research and development but not for marketing and outreach. So that became a challenge of you make this interesting thing, nobody knows about it. And how do you get it out there? So that was one of the raison d'etre of the Learning Games Network to have a way outside of the university that we could be a little bit more flexible with both the revenue and spending. That also is grant funded and has gone through ups and downs and the downs are like year, like at least a year at a time that we don't have any money. And I have adapted my working style to maintain that connection. So I actually started another indie game developer company called Skylight Games that I run out of my bedroom. And that's a thing, a way to occupy my time while we're waiting for new grants with the Learning Games Network. So I'm really excited that we're launching our first app through Skylight Games on Monday. It's a language learning game called Lyrico, L-Y-R-I-K-O. So I hope you all check it out. And yeah, that's it. Peace out. Peace out, yeah. Great, thank you. Nice plot. I work in advertising and that's why I like commercial messages right in between the speakers. I wish we had some more. I came here in 2004. Before that, I had studied, I had been studying philosophy of virtual culture. I've learned about this program incidentally. I wanted to study, I was about to go study public relations actually, but then I read this wonderful article about Henry's experience on the TV show and angry moms calling about Grand Theft Auto. And that kind of sparked the interest in this. And I thought it was a very unique place to study something that I was doing anyway. So with the dream and the 70 extra bucks, a scrounge for an application, they applied kind of on the whim. And I'm surprised it worked out. So I guess the lack of mission standards that list less until 2004. Here, obviously I took the Quark classes. And the great thing about the institute is that you can sort of go, it's like an intellectual buffet in a sense. You can go and take different classes and kind of structure your own curriculum. So I took a bunch of, I already did a bunch of classes, marketing classes at Sloan, just to see what that's like and that was okay. I wish I could, I wish I could take in other classes and in kind of neuroscience swing because that's what I find very useful in my work right now, but now I have to rely on Corsair and kind of textbooks. But at the end, I sort of put together some foundation that's been helping me for the past 10 years. Here, we work with Sam, who is also in the audience, who worked in the Convergence Cultures Consortium, which we started with promotion and a bunch of other smart guys. And that was the kind of the commercial, that was the commercial front of the whole same mass operation that talked to brand owners and the media owners, and we tried to unlock the kind of, the reasons why people choose the brands that they choose and how the popular culture influences that. And that's, you know, that has remained the kind of stuff that I do now as a research advertising agency, where I've been since since I graduated here. And you know that the, with this benefit of a perspective now, CMS and the Institute in general influences your life differently, you know, kind of the further you move away, you know, initially you come out refreshed with all those different perspectives and you uncover things from angles that you never really even knew existed. And that's, this is one of the great things of this place is that it brings together people who otherwise probably would never come together because they sort of work in entirely different spheres. And, you know, when the Institute's name opens doors and people serve like, you know, oh, oh, so you might, you probably know math kind of, you know, you kind of, kind of, but, you know, that happens in the beginning. It doesn't really go away but that's what's important in the beginning. Now that they have to structure kind of the work of groups of people, the way CMS is structured has proved to be a very good model for that as well. Because you know that if you want to bring new, if you want the group to come up with new ideas, you have to bring people who are not, not only people who are good at the same thing that you are, right? So, but like people who are good at different things and, you know, get them together and start talking and maybe, you know, if you have somebody who studies comic books and somebody who studies rocket science, maybe you, you know, something new will come up. So that's kind of my pitch. So I'm Eric Staten. I'm one of the newer graduates on this panel. So I just finished in the spring and now I'm at a PhD program. So my post-CMS career is all of five or six months. So I'm, you know, definitely sort of in this vein going to, you know, narrate from how I got here and sort of how I see just looking back in those couple of months how what I've learned here is still influencing the work that I'm doing. So just as a sort of background, I'm a long-time programmer, also a web designer, but I did physics in undergrad. I sort of intend to go on and do an astrophysics PhD and sort of that would be what I did. And right at the sort of last possible moment doing an undergraduate thesis in that and realizing that though I love the material that wasn't the kind of research I wanted to do, you know, for the rest of my career. I also, so I had been taking a lot of English courses on the encouragement of a friend I took a course in modern culture and media studies at Brown taught by Wendy Chung called Race and Slash As Technology. Quite an interesting name. And that made me sort of realize that the literary critical machinery that I had been developing over in English combined with my interest in technology that there was this interesting space to use that to critique modern technology, modern culture. And it seemed like it would be a good place to come learn some sort of new techniques, do some work that wasn't traditional, you know, humanities, academic work, but would be useful to me in what I continued to do, whether that was continuing in academia or not. And I really think that, you know, it was a good thing to do to come here for that purpose. Additionally, it wasn't, CMS isn't a place where your, you know, though you're doing this research, it's not like your research group hands you a master's project and says, do this. So that was also really important for me because I had just discovered this new area of interest that seemed to bring together a lot of things, but I wanted the freedom to sort of design my own project and figure out what to do. And so there's a lot of, definitely a lot of structured assistance here. I mean, the faculty are really interested in making sure that you're doing something, you're thinking tactically about what you're doing and that you're doing something that's not only meaningful to you but has some sort of impact in the world, but it's really up to you to, you know, design that project for yourself and that was something that seemed to really fit what I wanted. There were also, of course, in particular people here who I was interested in working with, Nick Montfort at the trope tank where I did my research assistantship. I mean, studies, software studies, platform studies does sort of history, material history of computing work that was really interesting to me. And so that was also a big factor for my coming here. I actually found the program was more broadly useful than I had anticipated. I had a lot of good conversations with people who were not sort of in my technical area but had a lot of great ideas and sort of moved my work around in ways that were really productive. Just to briefly outline my thesis work because that's still really relevant here just a couple of months on, my thesis is on automated vehicles or self-driving cars, the way that they seem to be most often talked about. So looking at media representations of those kind of devices, compared with the ways that they're, written about in engineering papers were talked about by engineers if you can go and speak to them. And trying to figure out where are the gaps in sort of public understanding of those kinds of technologies and what does that say for better ways that we could understand our relationships to them or other sorts of policy questions that we need to be asking. And I found that this was, it's sort of different than some of the other projects but I think that's characteristic a lot of people coming through CMS for very different kinds of theses. And it was useful to me to sort of bring together the science, technology studies side in the media context. I also, so my second reader and second committee member on that thesis was David Mandel who's over in past the program I'm in now. So I sort of angled my work in that direction. And now that I'm at Haas, I'm sort of looking around for new technological artifacts to do similar kinds of work with. But I have two projects going on now that I should just briefly mention because they make the case for I think for what my CMS experience is still doing in my current work. So one of those is looking at driverless vehicles and ethical frameworks for them. So utilitarianism or other sorts of ways of thinking about ethics of these kind of systems which could be a straight up philosophy of technology project. But one of the main places that that discussion is being carried out is in news articles with rather unhelpful titles like will your car be programmed to kill you? Which I don't think adds meaningfully really to the sort of public knowledge about these systems but it's interesting that that discussion is happening in a particular way. And so that's something that I'm trying to investigate there. Also finally getting a chance to go back and read some of the original papers in AI, cybernetics from the 40s, 50s, and 60s which could be a sort of straight up history of science. But in my sort of attempts to see how these people are at the time defining their terms and setting their work against each other, I'm bringing in some of the sort of concepts about dealing with these papers not just as sources of scholarly data but as media artifacts themselves, that they are performative texts, they're rhetorical, they're created by particular people in particular contexts and circulate in particular ways and that they have a sort of materiality as either dissertations collected into a book or white papers being distributed by Rand Corporation or MIT Lincoln Labs or something like that. So trying to take some of those media aspects seriously while I'm doing sort of history of science work. So if you want to know more about anything else including like strategizing master's thesis towards PhD or anything like that, please ask me the questions but I'll hand it over to Chelsea. Okay, cool. He's keeping track of the time. So my name is Chelsea Farabas. I also graduated in June and... You graduated in November. I graduated in June, 2015, about four months ago and so Eric and I are in the same cohort and I think have a lot of actually similarities in kind of our decision making process and the things that we found valuing in the program. So I also was considering vastly different types of programs when I was thinking about graduate school and to understand that maybe it would be helpful to talk about what I was doing before. So I spent four or five years living in South, between South America and East Africa where I was doing a lot of kind of what you might consider international development work but the work I was doing was very deep, like kind of fundamentally shaped by kind of a movement that I think is heavily steeped in Silicon Valley culture. So I graduated from Stanford, started working for this startup international development company that does a lot with effective altruism. So this idea that there should be rigorous and systematic ways that you can think about approaching social change, internet, like social development, things like that, particularly abroad and a huge part of that work is centered around this idea of entrepreneurship and fostering entrepreneurship abroad. Couched in that is another narrative around kind of the idea of human capital development and the role that learning plays in basically fostering development. So teaching people how to be entrepreneurs will now lead to kind of exponential impacts because this one person will now start a company that will scale to this growth, a highly scalable product or service that's gonna improve people's lives and then you're gonna scale impact that way. So I was very much a part of that work. A lot of what I was doing was actually working with social entrepreneurs in rural places to collaboratively kind of develop products and services that fit kind of a social enterprise model. So, you know, enabling people to have clean water that didn't have germs in them, increasing their crop yields, literacy programs, things like this. So as I was doing that work though, I started to realize kind of how some of that narrative, some of the way we were thinking about that social change stuff and its relationship to technology was hard for me to believe doing it in the field. A lot of the things about, you know, especially with the rise of mobile phones in places like Kenya, there's a huge emphasis in trying to build mobile apps to teach farmers better farming practices, teach better savings practices for microfinance and things like this. So I got really interested in kind of wanting to understand a lot more deeply. One, how we learn and two, how that learning actually shapes our behavior and our kind of life prospects. So what opportunities open up for us when we do learn new things, things like that. So it's considered a PhD in cognitive psychology over at Harvard. That didn't seem to be really kind of the right path. One, it was PhD. Also though, very focused on the individual unit of a learner, right? And the cognitive processes underlying how we learn, which is fascinating and really helps to inform and some great critiques of some of the digital learning movement that are out there. But not quite, didn't have the system level kind of thinking that I was looking for. The other program was in the School of Education, at Stanford digital, digital, I forget what it's called, like DTS or something. I bet somebody in here's applied to it as well. Like digital, yeah. What's it called? Digital. It's called digital technology making or something. Yeah. And was a little worried going back there because it also seemed like there wasn't much of a critical approach to kind of really understanding what technology's role is in kind of learning and connecting to kind of bigger issues of inequality. There's like another big kind of narrative around the role that school plays as like an equalizer in playing fields that I wasn't seeing. A lot of what they were doing was really deeply entrenched in kind of like the existing school system and kind of playing technology on top of it. This program, I had no idea what it was gonna be about but everybody I talked to seemed to have really thoughtful questions to ask me about my work, even though they weren't people who necessarily had domain expertise and the things that I was interested in studying. So big fear I had was that there weren't a lot of people who could give me a lot of in-depth guidance in my domain but at the same time, like it did seem like the types of conversations that people were having here were cutting across. Like a lot of, like each of us, I think in our cohort for example, I feel like in our years or the years like when the discussion of the algorithm really started to blow up, right? And algorithmic bias and out control of algorithms and things like this. And it led to a lot of really fruitful conversations within our cohort that each of us could kind of pull from and connect to our own work in really interesting ways. So yeah, I chose this program for that. When I got here, I think a lot of my work ended up shifting to not so much the how do we use technology to foster kind of better kind of learning models whether it be within or without of school. So much as thinking about this movement to unbundle education, break apart and decouple learning opportunities from institutions like universities and things like that. And so instead of focusing on that, like this movement to unbundle higher ed, I was really interested in kind of the question of, okay, we have now a much broader set of learning opportunities that are starting to emerge that we could as consumers choose. How do we make decisions about that? Part of the way we're gonna make decisions is knowing how well that learning experience with that credential can translate into real opportunities in the labor market. So a lot of my work was looking at actually the digital badging credentialing and issues of credentialing that must be answered in order to understand the value of alternative education models. I specifically focused on the tech industry because that's an industry that has a lot of resources outside of a traditional university kind of available to you if you wanna learn how to code and develop a marketable skill set. And while I was doing that work, came across a set of practices that are kind of really shaping my work now, which is called passive recruitment. So basically a process of scraping data that's publicly available on the internet and forming dossiers of information about individuals without their knowledge and selling those dossiers of information to recruiters who are looking for people to recruit for jobs. But not, so selling those things and offering basically recommendations on who would be a good employee. So a lot of my work here, it was really helpful talking to people like Eric, even though Eric was working on self-driving cars, I was starting to look at civil rights issues related to algorithmic recruitment tools and we could get together and have really interesting conversations about the intersections of our work. So yeah, did that. I was expecting to leave here when I graduated. I was excited to get out of the cold, but I don't know, I found a cool opportunity here that I started the week after I graduated, which was a new initiative actually based in the Media Lab called the Digital Currency Initiative. And I'm just in the interest of time, I won't necessarily explain why, I think that connects to the work I'm doing now, but it does. You get to do it in 10 minutes. Okay, cool. So I will leave. So, you know, as I was looking at some of the, one of the things that really kind of concerned me when I started looking at these passive recruitment practices was that they mirrored and exacerbated a lot of the issues we've seen kind of over the last several decades related to like credit reporting companies. So these are also companies who are in the business of harvesting your data and selling it to other people to inform their decisions about you and deny or offer you opportunities. As information has gotten more and more digital, credit reporting regulation has gotten more and more difficult to implement effectively. And I think now the companies who are doing this passive recruitment stuff, their behaviors and all intents and purposes look exactly like what credit reporting agencies do, but it's basically all of the legal paradigms we had in place to basically protect consumers against erroneous data being collected and used against them. Faulty algorithms used to calculate scores about you, things like double positives, people having the same name, things like that. There was no due process kind of thing put into place for consumers to be able to deal with that in the digital world. And the problems are magnified in all these crazy ways now because we live basically in a digital world where we as consumers have very little control over our data and very little, we don't have the infrastructure kind of available to us to be able to extract value or insights from it. So I started looking and getting interested in Bitcoin, actually, because I started hearing people talk about Bitcoin basically as a potential underlying kind of backbone for a much more user-centered digital management infrastructure. Probably won't get into all of this right now, but this means much further beyond just financial transactions and thinking about using the technology underlying Bitcoin as a way for us as individuals to be able to manage access to our own data. Two third-party providers, clients built on top of it that want to provide us services in a way that we fundamentally control much more than we do now, with huge companies like Facebook and Google basically having these big infrastructures, both hardware and software-wise, to be able to harvest and build AI machines to control our data. Sorry, I wasn't planning to talk about this too much, but yeah, so anyway, my master's work, I think directly led to the work I'm doing now, and I'm still sticking around because I think this place is fun. Great, thank you. Cool. So I want to ask the panelists, whenever anyone asks them a question, just to repeat it. It slows things down a little bit, but we are live streaming the event and anyone who's not really near that microphone can't be heard, so good to repeat the question. When you ask the question, if you could identify yourself, that would be great. And I'm just curious, I know that Sam Ford is an alum in the audience. Do we have other alums in the audience? Okay, great. What's your name? Singhita. Hi, thanks for coming. Okay, great. Let's go. So as you guys know, I do the communications for the program. Andrew, you guys haven't met yet. And one of the challenges of the program, like this marketing, is that we basically say our niche is that we don't really have a niche. You can fill in the niche anywhere you want. So what I end up offering and falling back on is that we are a media studies program at MIT that the program that gets us special is that we're at MIT. So I'm just kind of curious to hear from you guys. What is it about the institute? What did you get out of MIT? What was special about being here for a program for two years that you think you may not have gotten anywhere else? Quick repeat. So the question is how should we describe the real uniqueness of the CMS program and particularly specifically what is the MIT environment really add to it? I think a big one that... There's a big research right now. Right, I'm doing very easy. There. The big one that somebody mentioned here was it is immensely powerful to have an at MIT.edu email address. There were a lot of people I reached out to before this program that did never respond to me, that did respond once I was in this program. So that's one thing. But yeah, I think another thing I really benefited from was I was in a research group that was a joint CMS media lab, research groups, Center for Civic Media. And so I really enjoyed having a cohort of students on that side that were doing very different things and had different skill sets for me that really pushed my thinking and introduced me to things that I wouldn't have gotten, I think, in a traditional media studies program. I mean, I think there's, for me, it's that there are just a ton of resources here and it is easy to allow yourself to sort of sit in a little MIT humanities bubble and not go outside of it. But there is a huge world there if you're sort of willing to do that to go out there to talk to other people in other departments. I mean, for me, it was useful to have people like John Leonard who worked on the DARPA Urban Challenge project here on campus. I mean, he's doing other things now, but that I was able to take a class and he came in and talked to our class and he got to ask him some questions. Those sorts of interactions with, for my interest in technology, with engineers and technical people were really important for the work that I wanted to do. And it was something that I had to go out and find, but that is very much here and there's a lot of history and great documents about people like Norbert Wiener and the archives and things like that. So there is this sort of techno science center here that for my kind of work was particularly useful. Well, you can say that studying media here, you study it at the source because a lot of what we call media now, that's it started putting the swalls from video games to got who knows what media lab is cooking up now. So that would be an easy answer. That's very convincing problem. We could test that. Like for me, it's this interesting way to combine the institute's focus on technology, MIT being a technology institute and the kind of very humanistic aspect of CMS and its focus not just on obstructions and systems but on people. One of my college professors said that the course, the class is successful with 10 years after it, you remember one thing. Going thinking back about college, I probably remember six things after four years, which is not a bad return on investment. If I were to carry out, carry away one thing from my CMS experience is that it's something that is so simple but it's so rare in, at least in the world why I work, is that people are, people have agency. People do things because they want to do things and there are mechanisms within our psychology around us that in response to which we do things and their evolutionary reasons why we do things. But somehow when we discuss, when other places discuss media and they discuss technology, they talk about the humans are sort of just like a thing that's over there and we have to kind of contend with their existence but no, let's talk about media. And it's very difficult to understand the reasons of why things happening in the abstractions if you don't understand the basic unit of action which is humans. So I think this combination of the institute of technology and a very humanistic and human centered program within it, it's a very powerful combination in how it shapes your thinking as the time progresses and you have to deal with different ways of thinking outside of it. I would sort of say something that I think sums up what everybody else has said which is that it's extremely rigorous here but one of the beauties of the CMS program is that it's sort of rigor that transcends boundaries. So if you were gonna go into a more traditional program that's a little bit more of a narrower focus in here you can sort of do wherever your passion takes you which is wonderful. Yeah, just to build on that, you know, I think there's a schism in education that's a little bit class oriented around like theoretical or practical. Practical is vocational is maybe for people who couldn't cut it in a theoretical world and theoretical then sometimes spirals off into being so self-contained and isolated that it's disconnected from the world that it attempts to examine. And what I love about MIT, you know, mind and hand that we're trying to connect the two and I think especially what you said about transcending boundaries, this is really a place where people don't restrict themselves to the traditional pillars or silos and that's one of my pet peeves for my education before coming to MIT. I felt like questions would often be asked like, well, what's your background and are you talking about something that's outside of your background? Because if so, I'm gonna put you back in line and here people were not afraid to think about something that they didn't have a background in. And if you approach someone else in the university, people wouldn't shut you down, they would try to support you, try to connect you with something new. And I felt like at least in the research group that I was a part of making things and trying to lead industry thought theoretically at the same time was a very powerful combination. So. Welding and philosophy. That's right. It's mostly limited to welding. If you're interested in other things, we don't do that. The other thing I would say, you all know this Gibson's Court about future and not being distributed equally. You know, it's here. Well, this is where it's distributed. It's right here. A lot of things we were talking, it's so fascinating. A lot of things we were talking about in our group, in our classes, about how things within are working out. Well, the real life is still catching up to those thoughts of all that work that's been done 10 years ago. And that's fascinating. I just finished a short masters program over at the Pharmacy Education School where through the past year, I learned there are laws out there and coming from the industry, there are realistic laws in the world. And so I do wonder what are everyone's long-term and long-term plan for what to do from here and how that fits into, yeah, just the realistic demands of the world. So the question was about Walls founded other institutions, and how we... Just like five years from now. Five years from now. What do you think you want to be doing, or is that too far away? That's a really, I mean, I have no idea. But I know that whatever it is, it's going to be really interesting and sort of gets me here, honestly. And you know, I'd love to hear more about your educational experience because I did work at Huggsy for a number of years and it is pretty siloed there. And coming from here where it's like, oh, the astrophysicist and the speed skater are going to get together and invent something new, it's not really like that, there are different rules. And out in the world, if you look at it vocationally, like what jobs there are, it sort of seems like that at first, but if you poke a little bit more deeply, there is space for those people like us who are doing interesting things sort of in between the spaces. So I think the future is bright. And I don't know if I answered your question. Well, I consider myself a social entrepreneur. So I recognize that there are walls and I avoid organizations that operate in that way. So I did work at Microsoft and other large companies. Now I run my own company. So there's a reason for that. Did you want to address the question where you need to find this? Yeah, I mean, actually I do have an answer because I'm doing the startup and if it succeeds, I'll still be doing the startup. So Skylight Games is a learning game organization and the mission is to inspire a love of learning through play. So our constraints are in the marketplace because we're a business. So what can we get people to care about? And there's a million ways to think about that. I mean, for me, I definitely have a sense of that sort of only semi-permeable walls, nature of these certain types of work because ideally really what I'd like to do is to try and sort of stand on both sides of the sort of engineering and STS space to the reason that I'm interested in the work that I'm interested in is not just a sort of arbitrary interest, it's that I'd like to think about how we can better design systems or better design sort of society to cope with these sorts of systems. On the other hand, that sort of technical knowledge is important to me for doing the work in STS but it is very difficult. It can be very difficult to sort of talk to pure engineers and sort of make those alternative perspectives harder. I don't have an answer for this but it's a problem that I sort of think about a lot. I mean, I guess in five years I will be hopefully finishing up this program and looking for postdocs or other things like that. I am sort of angling for something that is in the research space. I mean, like Xerox PARC is one of my favorite sort of historical research institutions and they don't do a lot in this vein now but in their heyday they were one of these places that brought together a lot of different people to do work that I think had pretty low barriers once you were inside of it. So there are places like Microsoft Research that seem to have components of that now. That's sort of what I would be headed towards but I don't sort of have the delusion that that's easy or simple necessarily to sort of walk on both sides of that. So, you know, like the perennial phrase or whatever is like CMS prepares you for jobs that don't exist yet, right? We can't bring that around somewhat bitterly as we got closer and closer to May, 2015. And most of us didn't know what we were doing when we graduated and I'm just now as we've been talking, thinking about what everybody's doing now and I would say most people have jobs now that didn't exist when we were in grad school like five months ago. So I mean, we've got Ainsley working at this new coal division in what's the- It's BuzzFeed. It's BuzzFeed, it's BuzzFeed. I was gonna say God for many of those wrong. BuzzFeed, Heather has a cool new job at the News Lab with Google which is brand new. Liam got a new, cool job with Texas monthly working in a very fast new space for developers and news. Jesse's working in the eSports realm which is a brand new industry. I'm working in Bitcoin which is fake internet money. So I think people, I think that's true and I think that the thing I wish that we had a little bit more of was I think CMS professors are really good at making you describe what you're interested in over and over and over again. Every time you have a visitor, every time you have a new person come in which is really awesome. I wish we had had a little bit more training or been nudged to do that to a slightly broader set of audiences. And I also kind of wish we had somebody who helped us specifically think about our job, like think about our next step. And I don't think faculty is the best because they are specialized in what they do. They don't have the industry connects to help you brand store them with like, oh, maybe you should talk to this person, this person. So that would be your request. And I didn't answer the question about what I'll be doing in five years. I don't know. I think that the two things that I tried to make decisions based on is the interestingness of the question and then like is there a platform that would enable me to explore it? And I have one right now. I don't know how long I'm gonna last. Okay. Dan, did you want to add anything or? I don't, what kind of walls? Yeah. I guess just disciplinary. I mean, it's common things that we all probably have like this one has around it too. It's like, which department is your, I just currently feel a little bit intellectually homeless until I watch this room, right? But then they'll probably have it again after a program like this ends. But yeah, just kind of lost in terms of disciplinary in terms of like establishing this recent institution. Also like some people just study their own thing and don't venture outside? Yeah. Or that like, how is what you were interested in relevant to particular subjects? Like I guess everything we've been talking about is just that lingering fear that I just begin to have at this age of, oh, actually, what we do about it is that. I feel, I feel I'm lucky in a sense that advertising in the industry that sucks everything else in it, so I can make a good use of everything that's been said here, you know, from Bitcoin, which we have, you know, to self-driving cars, maybe in a couple of years. So those walls don't really exist. You know, if we see it and it has value, you know, it's just a joke. The difficult, you know, the most, the hardest, the most frustrating walls to overcome are the walls within your head. It's when you, you know, you hit the limits of your own, you know, you explore something deep enough and then you hit the limits, you know, your letter ends, you know, you hit the limits of your own knowledge and then you realize that the new letter, you know, you have to complete another PhD program just to understand how something works. And that's very dispiriting, like knowing that, you know, you feel like you know something finally and then you hit this point where like, oh, there is this other room that, you know, you have no idea. So that's probably a bigger problem to solve for me. Yeah. And I want to say as somebody who was laid off three weeks ago that like, I think anything that we plan for five years from now can change very quickly, you know, and I think really there are going to be new ways to combine skills in five years. There's going to be new ways to look at them and there's going to be new institutions that are catering to this. I mean, who had even thought of Bitcoin, you know, five years ago, like maybe some people did, but it wasn't really public, you know, or you know, culture is always like this moving target. And it's really, I think people sort of sometimes get in trouble when they think they know what's coming because we don't, none of us really know what's coming. One of the walls that a friend of mine was very frustrated by, actually he didn't go to CMS, but he did a PhD in CSAIL and he was interested in the mind. And he would say to me that he felt like he was born a century too soon because the tools to examine the mind at the level he wanted to don't exist today. So. That's actually exactly what I thought was going to happen. I just came out of the Mind-Bringed Education program and as you said, the next room that's deeper into English and technology and things like that where he labs, go by PCS, oh, we're not there yet. Yeah. I understand what you're doing. Yeah, I had a question. I work in a grant funded digital humanities program and we're constantly sort of thinking about questions of innovation and what's sort of coming down the pike and the next big thing around the intersection with digital technologies and humanities more broadly. And I'm wondering, it's kind of building off of sort of where this last question ended. I promise I'll give you a short version that you can repeat in the microphone. The ways that the sort of drive-thru working new spaces are challenging, I don't know if you can speak a little bit on that, but the challenges of always kind of being on the verge and the ways that your time in CMS prepared you or helped you think about different ways to sort of think theoretically about being on the leading edge of something. So I guess that's the short version. I kind of see CMS help you deal with the shock of the new. How did CMS help us deal with the shock of the new was the question? He said it very slowly. That's why it took three minutes. Well, just in my space, I'll talk about, when I started making apps, apps were new. They're not new anymore. So the fastest, earliest app developers got a lot of publicity for free by being one of a small number of apps. That's not true anymore. You could say it's the same thing today with VR. So then if you sort of have to decide, are you an app developer? Are you a VR developer? Are you gonna switch every time there's a new technology? Are you going to continue to deepen on the technology that you've already started on? There are elements of how much am I willing to throw away and begin again. Obviously anything in technology, you have to sort of remake yourself every few years. So people who aren't willing to do that won't stay relevant. I think the master's thesis is really useful for this because you are attracted to these cutting edge things that could have all these big implications and you hear it see all these headlines that are really provocative. And most people like to hover at that level of conversation and you just can't for a thesis. You have to think about, okay, in this limited period of time, what kind of information can I gather and look at that's gonna help me answer a specific question that's gonna offer a new insight into this big new thing. So it helps you really learn how to go past this high level speculation to thinking about what's a thoughtful question to ask and then making a plan to ask it. So that was really helpful. Yeah, and I think that goes with what I sort of said in my introduction about the way that the program asks you and sort of teaches you to be strategic about what your intervention is. To like, I mean one of the terms that William Erickio really likes is mapping the fields. It's like figure out your question is the nexus of some set of things, some of which are maybe very old, some of which are new, trying to sort of get dirty in these different sort of discourses and figure out how I can apply the ideas from anthropology of magic or something like that to this sort of new technology that I wanna look into and just that sort of lateral thinking and just being pushed to do that sort of work across different spaces. I think, I mean that's something that I'm going to sort of keep reusing whenever I'm dealing with this sort of, it's a new device, it's a new sort of technology, it's being used in a new way. How do we think about that? There are always long historical strands to anything that you can sort of pull apart and then just sort of the feeling some drive, like someone has to start doing serious work on things, even if there are only something that's existed for six months, just having the space to do something like that I think was useful and will continue to be useful from my sort of more, I mean, perspective within academia, so to speak, as I'm sitting at the start of a PhD program. I started, I was a big fan of the future when I was here. I started, I was such a big fan that I started 2004, I started this thing called a blog. It was actually how I got my job is like my future boss was reading one of the few blogs that existed and that very cutting-edge thing. And the blog was about the future of advertising. So I was hunting down all those things that would be happening. And my job 10 years ago was to go around the clients and explain to people what Facebook is and that exists and it's this cool thing where they should experiment and second life. So those were two big things 10 years ago. And after a while, I know we have an entire department that sort of does the same thing, but about periscope or whatever the new thing is. I became disenchanted for the future and I'm glad I'm not the one doing that stuff anymore because it's becoming very frustrating and like chasing ghosts, kind of ghostbusters, right? So you go around like, oh, this is the new thing. And then the new thing either happens or maybe it doesn't. But by the time it does, it's not a future thing anymore. By the time it's worth paying attention to, at least from the business perspective, it's not the future anymore and it's this big thing. So I give up. I said, screw the future. I'm gonna focus on things that happen right now and when it hits me, it hits me. And to deal with this, I started looking at kind of the core reasons why certain things happen. And once you start looking there, you understand that people throughout, the humanity is fairly short history. They all driven by the same motivations and those motivations have biological reasons and societal reasons. Once you have that simple set of rules, the world becomes a lot easier to handle. When you say the shock of the new, I don't quite know if you're referring to technology or just a cognitive response to change. I mean, what I will say about the program itself is that I felt like I was always being thrown into something over my head in a good way. And it really depends if you're the kind of person who says, I'm gonna swim my way out of this or you freak out. I think it's one of those things. I was out of school for a while when I went into the program too, so I had to relearn things like how to write papers and stuff, so. What's one people to speak about the strength of either the CMS network or the larger alumni network, either the amount of people within the program over time or the larger MIT network in terms of either the projects or your jobs after finishing the program and how it's impacted you and the strength of that network as well. Well, I have a pretty direct connection as I look at Henry. Sorry, I have a question really. I'm sorry, right. So the question is about the strength of the network ties that were developed in the program both within the program and at MIT in general. All right, so yeah, I mean, the tie with Henry was strong enough to start me on this path that I've been on now for 10 years that that's kind of a very strong recommendation, but it doesn't, you know, that's a pretty isolated event. I mean, in terms of alumni, I keep in touch with my cohort pretty closely. I had the good fortune of actually returning to the program later, you know, as a employee and I get to know other people like Dan, you know, younger than me going through the program. And when you go through MIT, you do get access to all of that good stuff like the alumni network and a great alum, MIT.edu email feed and you get access to all of the information on alumni there and you can go in and you can search for people who are in your field. And some of them are actually indicated as wanting to be actively counseling fellow alumni. And so you can just write to them, which is really neat. I already sort of said I'm working with people that I met in the program. So very strong connections with a small subset of the network and not so connected to the broader network. Especially if you're in Boston, you know, all the other things that are true to other university alum networks, they're true here as well. You know, you keep in touch and you participate in things and you participate in things like this. And it's all very, you know, it feels good. The thing that's unique to MIT and to Boston is that, you know, when you work around here, you very often end up working with companies that it turns out where I started by somebody who was living, you know, two doors down the hall in the same dorm. And that, you know, that kind of builds up an instant connection for you. That was really cool. Yeah, I mean, for me, I did find it useful to have some, I mean, relatively recent alums who have gone through the program were either, you know, in the middle of a PhD or had sort of completed their PhD and done some postdocs and been able to talk to them about, you know, how to position myself, what programs I should apply to. So, I mean, Kevin Driscoll and Nick Siever were both people that I met, you know, alums of the program that I met through them coming here to give, like, colloquium talks or other sorts of things. And they were both really helpful to me in my PhD search. So, there's also, if you're headed in that direction, there is also a network of people who are at various stages in academia to sort of, you know, draw on their perspectives. And it helped that these were, you know, people interested in some of the same issues that I am in different ways. And so that was, you know, a useful network for me. I don't have anything more to add, I agree. You also, as a benefit, you also get this brush, accidental brush with geeky celebrities or in any way. But yeah, you know, you play BioShock and it's Bio, you know, the third BioShock and it's totally awesome. And then you suddenly realize that Christina used to, you know, wrote Skaff of the Dialogue for it and you're like, wow. You know, the Star Wars is coming out and you, you know, the guy who's been working on the Star Wars, on the aspect of it, you know, you've been drinking at Charles, you know, three in the morning, two in the morning. So that, you know, those bragging rights, they also, of course, exist. And those people, you know, they were right in the same room with you, you know. And the latest one, Fallout 4, you're probably all familiar with, Chris Weaver was a teacher in the programs. I was great to have that experience. Oh, yeah, that's, that's, that's like. You started that company? That's a bottomless kind of source of bragging rights. So if you like, you know, Fallout, Skyrim and, you know. Yeah. Of course, MIT is evil in that game, so. The Institute, the Institute. Oh, the Institute, yes. Commonwealth Institute of Technology. I'm Lacey, I'm a second year master's student. And this is kind of a general question because we have students that are thinking about same master's students and second year students here. So I was wondering just if you guys had general tips or things that you wish you had known before coming to CMS or while you were a student here. I have a tip about your thesis. And somebody told me this, somebody told me this my first semester here, so maybe too late for you, but everybody else, there's still hope. Which is that when you, like have in your mind sort of where you want to go and have everything that you produce leading towards that. So if you have a paper that's due for, you know, something rather, have it be on maybe one element of what you think you've got to be writing about down the line. And it actually, I sort of was able to do this sort of, but even doing it a little bit helped me immensely in the production of my thesis. That's a pro tip, okay. Oh man, let me give you totally opposite advice. I wish I hadn't taken all those marketing classes and maybe advertising classes because that stuff, kind of learn on the job or read from the books and that's easy. I wish I had taken classes that would never otherwise read the books about architecture or urban design or you know, psychology if they let me. So I wish I had done actually more of that red backing, than being absolutely focused. Well, it's sort of like, I took an art course and you know, it was a history of post-modern art or something like that. And boy, like I was really out of my element, you know, which was great, but you know, still thinking of it, I used it, you know, trying to think about some of the problems that were in my head. So sort of using everything as a jumping off point for the problem, but it doesn't have to be the same discipline. Right, right. Yeah, so eventually things will arrange themselves in your head, so towards solving a particular problem that you end up with. But finding, you know, just exposing yourself to entirely different disciplines has been immensely useful. I'm still waiting, I took a class on the communication media during war with Beth Coleman so I'm still waiting for that to come in handy. But otherwise. The Public Service Center gives money for cool things. I got $10,000 over the two years. I was here from them for different projects and it's pretty easy to get it if you can explain the potential, social value of the work you're doing. So the broader tip is there's a lot of money. There's money? And if they actually want to give it away to you, just do neat stuff. Yeah, yeah, that's true. I mean, I don't know that I have much to add to that, honestly, but the sort of making everything that you, whether or not you think it's gonna be useful to you from the start, making everything useful to some, whether it's sort of closing off a door, like now I know I don't wanna go in that direction. Thinking about it that way, that at least, if you have to take this sort of course that doesn't quite feel right to you, at least it's informative, view it all as informative and then it's maybe less frustrating. And it might make sense later. Yeah, and it might make sense later. I mean, I think as an historian, I teach a lot of historical material and often my students are more like techno futurists. And so they're like, wait, why do we have to learn about the past? And I have to believe that someday you'll be like, yeah. I think that's totally, yeah. Your classes were always like, why am I taking this? But then I was like, why are we learning about comedy? And then I was like, it got super, like it informed everything to have perspective about these other massive transitions from like one media regime to another. I'm gonna cry. I'm gonna cry. It takes about seven years. I'm gonna cry. Anybody else? Sam, Ford, and one of the things that Chelsea brought up was this sort of spark of serendipity just happened to a place like CMS when you start meeting with people about things which you work on things very different than you, which have common questions. And to me, it seems that to get the use out of a program like CMS, you have to be somebody who is invigorated by that spark of serendipity and be looking for it because two years is a short time. And a lot of people, I don't know if you had this experience, like I left thinking, oh wow, I could use many more years of that. And the great thing about CMS is, I feel like as a network, it allows you to use many more years of that if you want to take advantage of it. There's a cultural anthropologist named Grant McCracken that many of you guys know him. He sort of used to hang around CMS a lot and they still come around from time to time. And he said that CMS, not just MIT, but CMS in particular seemed to have that very uniquely. So I was just curious if there's anything for you guys that while you were here comes to mind something that wouldn't have seemed useful immediately but like in retrospect. I mean, you kind of got at it with talking about Taylor's courses. But were there questions, things that you got introduced to, things even your colleagues were working on that you looked back on and say, wow, like those are issues I'm dealing with now. Just curious. Definitely for me, I ended up working really closely with a CMS alum actually a year ahead of me, Ravi Prushatma, who came specifically because Henry was here. So Henry was the magnet. And then Ravi and I worked on learning games and language learning games. And he introduced me to an idea that I'm still using today, which is working with people more globally. So there was a website, ODesk and Elance and Upwork. And you may be familiar with this, the gig economy, that kind of thing. So our startup now is basically entirely that way. We have 22 people across probably 15 countries. So I never imagined that I would work in that way before coming to CMS, but it's absolutely been transformative and I see it sticking. And the question was... I just let that slide. Yeah, sorry about that. I mean, in terms of serendipitous things, that's probably a pretty large one. I mean, I have a very small one, which was just that in one of William's classes, we were doing some, or just a conversation I had with him, the sort of idea about media archeology came up and he suggested, why don't you take a look in this like, he had sent me this website that has a lot of old magazine covers. And so we were looking through 1930s modern mechanics magazine and up comes this cover that says like light beams steer super racing car. And I would never have thought to go look at sort of this sort of popular mechanics style magazine from the 30s and yet I discovered here's this vision of some kind of driverless vehicle, imagined with technology that was sort of reasonable back then. And so that, I mean that also sparked an interest for me in how was this technology looked at it like various times and caused me to do more research in that area and tilt the sort of introduction to my thesis in that direction. So that's a sort of small example. I wouldn't have gone and done that unless I had had that conversation with William and he introduced me to that resource. Why is there no PhD option? What a great question, why is there no PhD here? I feel like, you know, is it Annie Paul when Woody Allen pulls my little clone out from my job? Where's the Dean to answer that? We've been working on this, we are hopeful. But it's a very complicated thing. So I just, I, it's hard to say. I feel like, I wish I had been in a debate training situation before this, so I've become very polished response to that. But really it's something that many of us are very enthusiastic about, we'd like to see it happen. We're not quite there yet. A lot of money mauled, you know. And there's a lot of resources involved just keeping a master's program going. You know, like how do we get more down just like making all the pieces work together? So it would be a logical kind of step to the next level. With regard to debate, you can't just tell your inner William Buckley. Fascinating question, very well. Anybody else? I will just, it looks like we're probably winding down now. And I was thinking, I didn't know how to answer the serendipity question, but I was just thinking. So I sort of went in and audited one of the first courses at CMS that, and Henry taught. And it had been so long since I'd been in any kind of academic setting. And we were reading Walter Benjamin, which if you're here, you've read and if you're not, you will read. And it was really hard for me. And I remember I was going away with a friend for the weekend and I said, no, you can't bother me. I have to read this. And she had two kids and I'm like, I can't take this. And I went into a closet and I sat down with Benjamin and I'm like reading it line by line. But in doing so, it sort of blew my mind and it opened up something just like a broader understanding of what was possible. And you talk about the serendipity. It's like sometimes you read these things and your world starts falling into place. You're like, oh, I understand this now. This is the coolest thing ever. Like the understanding is just this high. That's great. That's actually a very nice tip to end on. So there, thank you.