NEWS
What is a MOOC ?
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are free online courses that anybody can take, and those who complete the course can earn an official certificate for a fee. Top universities around the world offer MOOCs, and the total number of registered learners on the Coursera and edX platforms has reached more than 130 million. Along with self improvement, learners are using MOOCs to improve their professional skills, and the individually validated certificates are helping learners advance in the workplace and make career changes.
Featured Courses
From the Big Bang to Dark Energy
We have learned a lot recently about how the Universe evolved in 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang. More than 80% of matter in the Universe is mysterious Dark Matter, which made stars and galaxies to form. The newly discovered Higgs-boson became frozen into the Universe a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang and brought order to the Universe. Yet we still do not know how ordinary matter (atoms) survived against total annihilation by Anti-Matter. The expansion of the Universe started acceleration about 7 billion years ago and the Universe is being ripped apart. The culprit is Dark Energy, a mysterious energy multiplying in vacuum. I will present evidence behind these startling discoveries and discuss what we may learn in the near future.
Visualizing Postwar Tokyo, Part 2
The history of postwar Tokyo reveals an essential feature of the modern city, i.e. the city as a place of visualities. In postwar Tokyo, countless gazes fell upon others; gazes from and upon Americans and the Emperor, gazes going up skyscrapers or rushing aggressively through the cityscape, and gazes twining and wriggling among classes, genders, and ethnic groups in downtown Tokyo. In Part 2, we will focus on the geopolitics of these gazes in modern Tokyo. What kinds of gazes fell upon the war orphans, the poor, and the marginalized groups in Tokyo? How did students themselves, who represented the vast accumulation of knowledge in Tokyo, perform in front of these gazes? Moreover, how did cinema or television shows, as media for these gazes, implicate the whole city? In answering these questions, we will identify the geopolitics historically involved in the practice of “visualizing postwar Tokyo.”
Tokyo Hillside, Tokyo Riverside: Exploring the Historical City
In recent years, Tokyo became a global tourist destination as interest in the city increased in the lead-up to the planned 2020 Olympics. While the Olympic venues are concentrated in the city’s southwest and along the waterfront, Tokyo’s historical center and the roots of its urban culture are located in the northeast of the city, in an area stretching from Nihonbashi north through Kanda and Akihabara toward Ueno and Yanaka, and eastward to Asakusa. This area remains home to a wide range of unique historical and cultural heritage. This course offers an introduction to Tokyo’s urban history as Prof. Yoshimi explores northeast Tokyo by foot and boat in two sections: Tokyo Hillside and Tokyo Riverside. Visiting lesser-known historical places that have endured Tokyo’s modern transformation, this course will provide participants a different perspective on Tokyo when visiting for tourism, study, or work. Prof. Yoshimi proposes a method of geo-history that examines the city’s history in the context of its topography and social geography. Both the Hillside and Riverside sections focus on the spatial changes that took place as Tokyo underwent modernization. In particular, the course focuses on how the experience of three military occupations impacted Tokyo’s historical development. The first occupation was at the end of the 16th century, when Tokugawa Ieyasu established a new regime in Edo (modern-day Tokyo). The second was in the late 19th century, when the forces of the new imperial army arrived from Kyoto in the west. The third was the occupation by the American military that began in 1945 and preceded the rapid urban development of the 1950s and 1960s. The lectures will explain how the hillside and riverside areas were impacted by these occupations and underwent urban changes as a result.
Four Facets of Contemporary Japanese Architecture: Technology
This is the second course of “Four Facets of Contemporary Japanese Architecture” series, with the focus on the second facet: technology. The technology portion will focus on works by architects who explored the use of technology—from techniques used for traditional crafts to computational processes—as a vehicle for their investigations into the conceptualization and production of architecture. Tadao Ando, Shigeru Ban, Manabu Chiba, Kengo Kuma, Kazuhiko Namba, and Yusuke Obuchi will visit their buildings to discuss the ideas behind their respective works.
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