Innovations in music rank among America’s most significant contributions to global culture, none more so than jazz. From its humble beginnings as dance hall entertainment, jazz is now embraced as an art form, respected and imitated the world over. This music course addresses jazz from a listener’s perspective, but calls on professional jazz musicians to help us engage with this often mysterious aural experience. This six-week course will enable interaction with the basic components of jazz (swing, improvisation, structure and personal expression) while providing an inside connection to the artists who perform it. Content includes excerpts from the 300+ video interviews gathered with jazz personalities for the Fillius Jazz Archive, select scholarly readings and demonstrations offered by the instructor, a working musician. Students will engage in user-friendly activities that include listening, responding, counting, and internalizing the concepts that make jazz work. Rarely heard stories and anecdotes offered by our interviewees will stimulate the imagination and provide rich content for open discussion. We will celebrate the completion of the course with a live concert, streamed to participants of the course, who will also have an opportunity to interact with Monk. Jazz: The Music, The Stories, The Players will appeal equally to the casual listener, the avid fan and the proficient jazz player.

This course shows the emergence of modern Tokyo through artist renderings of its neighborhoods, daily life and nightlife, nested between its recurring destruction by natural disasters and war. Students will learn about the tradition of the “100 views,” and through these composite depictions of the city, will witness the excitement and loss of change. Kiyochika Kobayashi’s woodblock prints of Tokyo in the late 1870s convey a moody view on the cusp of change as the new capital, formerly Edo, begins modernization with Western influences. Koizumi Kishio’s depictions of the “Imperial Capital” in the 1930s show the lively cosmopolitanism and move toward ultranationalism that placed the emperor at its center. Learners will navigate visual primary sources and use them to investigate: • Tokyo, through the many locations depicted at different points in time, especially helpful if they would like visit these sites today; • the Meiji restoration and how Tokyo emerged from the earlier city of Edo to become Japan’s capital; • cultural and political interactions between east and west; • how Tokyo was rebuilt from various forms of destruction; • methods used by scholars and curators of the Visualizing Cultures project and Smithsonian Institution to develop online content and exhibitions; • the ability of visual motifs to capture tangible and intangible qualities of time and place; • how to read image sets, especially useful in the large digital archives of today; • woodblock print series, distribution, and competition from other media. The format of roundtable discussions between art historian, historians, and media specialists sets up a discursive and exploratory style of learning. Learners will be exposed to multiple points of view as the teaching team brings together scholars who have studied the topics from different disciplines. Learners will engage with visual evidence as primary sources to assemble arguments. For teachers, the course presents a number of units from the online resource, MIT Visualizing Cultures (VC). The course instructors are the authors of VC units, and guide students into the rich content on the site. The VC website, widely taught in both secondary and college courses, is the primary resource for this course. Educators can selectively pick modules that target needs in their classrooms; the course can be used in a “flipped” classroom where students are assigned modules as homework.

The purpose of this course ： is to improve students' understanding of the essence of Chinese landscape painting in the process of exploring the aesthetic interests and performance methods of Chinese landscape painting. Through the practice of brush and ink, students can improve their understanding and performance in material using and brush-ink structures. At the same time, it will improve the appreciation level of Chinese painting and lay the foundation for the innovative development of Chinese painting.

Want to listen to an opera for the first time? Have you been listening to opera for your entire life? This course is suited for beginners and advanced opera listeners alike! This course is an introduction to Italian opera, focusing on giving you the tools and experiences to become better students of opera. Act I will give you a toolbox of skills to listen for specific moments and gestures in opera. Act II will focus applying these skills to listening activities with your favorite Italian composers. At the end of the course, we will help you to carry these experiences beyond the course, encouraging you to become lifelong listeners and lovers of opera. No previous knowledge of music or opera is necessary. Join us as we embark upon this community-focused journey to explore the wonders of Italian opera as it touches upon the human experience!

Where is Giza? How were the Pyramids built? How did the cemeteries and hundreds of decorated tombs around them develop? What was Giza’s contribution to this first great age of ancient Egyptian civilization, the Old Kingdom? The Giza Plateau and its cemeteries — including the majestic Pyramids and the Great Sphinx — are stirring examples of ancient Egyptian architecture and culture. They provide windows into ancient Egyptian society, but also contain mysteries waiting to be solved. The Egyptian Pyramids at Giza provide an opportunity to explore the history of archaeology and to learn about some of the modern methods shaping the discipline today. This introductory course will explore the art, archaeology, and history surrounding the Giza Pyramids. We will learn about Egyptian pharaohs and high officials of the Pyramid Age, follow in the footsteps of the great 20th-century expeditions, and discover how cutting-edge digital tools like 3D-modeling are reshaping the discipline of Egyptology. Join us on this online journey to ancient Egypt’s most famous archaeological site as we uncover the history and significance of Giza, and use new digital techniques to unravel the mysteries of its ancient tombs and temples.

Knowledge of media law is crucial for creative and design professionals. This course explores a comprehensive range of topics and models, such as privacy and art, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Open Source public license, Creative Commons, Digital Rights Management, as well as working definitions of Fair Use and the practical limits of sampling/mixing in different idioms and economic sectors.

Pow! Bang! Kaboom! Superhero stories, first arriving on the scene in the late 1930s, are now among the most popular forms of global entertainment. The study of philosophy has been around for centuries. Power and Responsibility: Doing Philosophy with Superheroes, a SmithsonianX and Harvard Division of Continuing Education course, blends these superheroes narratives with the core areas of philosophy. SmithsonianX has partnered with the Harvard Division of Continuing Education to bring this course from the Harvard Extension School to edX. This introductory philosophy course, led by Professor Christopher Robichaud of the Harvard Kennedy School, offers an exciting lens to interpret key philosophical ideas — metaphysics and epistemology, social and political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of mind, existentialism, moral relativism, and much more. From Superman's embrace of truth, justice, and the American way to Wonder Woman's efforts at promoting peace rather than war, from Spider-Man's personal struggles at balancing his romantic life with his crime fighting exploits to the X-Men's social struggles with combating prejudice, Power and Responsibility: Doing Philosophy with Superheroes will give you the chance to explore philosophy through the many superhero narratives via videos, readings, and a meaningful course community. We invite both those new to philosophy and philosophy lovers to join us on this journey!

How do we deal with the challenges and threats to vernacular architecture and make sure that it is sustained in this modern urbanized world? This is the key question we will try to answer in this course. This architecture course takes you on a journey of understanding and appreciating the value of our everyday built environment. In the first two modules, we will explore the deeper socio-cultural meaning of rural vernacular architecture and look at the urban vernacular and challenges of people migrating from villages to live in cities; in module 3, we will focus on what we call ‘informal settlements’ in Asian cities; and in the final two modules, we will explore answers to a few questions that are very relevant to the current status and future development of vernacular architecture, such as: How can we conserve and sustain our vernacular cultural heritage? How can we reconcile tradition with modernity and originality? We will also cast our eyes into the future, and discuss how the field of vernacular architecture might evolve and develop in the years to come. Ultimately, the goal of this 5-week course is to help you establish your own viewpoints about the more complex or even contradictory issues in vernacular architecture, so you can make informed decisions regarding the protection and conservation of your local vernacular environments. Special note: This course can be taken independently from The Search of Vernacular Architecture of Asia, Part 1 . 我们要如何应对本土建筑面临的挑战和威胁？并确保本土建筑在这个现代城市化的世界中持续存在？ 我们在本课程中将解决這些问题。 本建筑课程将带领你理解和欣赏我们日常建筑环境。前两个单元，我们将探索农村本土建筑的深层社会文化意义，并了解城市本土建筑和从农村移居到城市的人们所面临的挑战；第三单元，我们将专注于亚洲几大城市中，我们所谓的“非正式定居点”；最后两个单元，我们将探索与本土建筑当前形势和未来发展相关的几个问题，例如：我们如何保护和维持我们的本土文化遗产？我们如何平衡传统与现代性和原真性？我们也将放眼未来，讨论本土建筑领域可能会往哪个方向演变，在未来几年可能会有怎样的发展。這5周的课程旨在帮助你在本土建筑领域一些更為复杂或更深層次的问题上形成你自己的见解，便于你能夠在本土环境的保护和保育方面做出明智的决定。 特别说明：本课程可独立于“亚洲乡土建筑研究（第一部分）”，单独选修。

This MITx course was developed in collaboration with HarvardX and is co-taught by MIT, Harvard, and Duke historians. You will examine Japanese history in a new way—through the images created by those who were there—and the skills and questions involved in reading history through images in the digital format. The introductory module considers methodologies historians use to “visualize” the past, followed by three modules that explore the themes of Westernization, in Commodore Perry’s 1853-54 expedition to Japan; social protest, in Tokyo’s 1905 Hibiya Riot; and modernity, as seen in the archives of the major Japanese cosmetics company, Shiseido. VJxwill cover the following topics in four modules: Module 0: Introduction: New Historical Sources for a Digital Age (Professors Dower, Gordon, Miyagawa). Digitization has dramatically altered historians' access to primary sources, making large databases of the visual record readily accessible. How is historical methodology changing in response to this seismic shift? How can scholars, students, and the general public make optimal use of these new digital resources? Module 1: Black Ships & Samurai (Professor Dower). Commodore Matthew Perry's 1853-54 expedition to force Japan to open its doors to the outside world is an extraordinary moment to look at by examining and comparing the visual representations left to us by both the American and Japanese sides of this encounter. This module also addresses the rapid Westernization undertaken by Japan in the half century following the Perry mission. Module 2: Social Protest in Imperial Japan: The Hibiya Riot of 1905 (Professor Gordon). The dramatic daily reports from participants in the massive "Hibiya Riot" in 1905, the first major social protest in the age of "imperial democracy" in Japan, offer a vivid and fresh perspective on the contentious domestic politics of an emerging imperial power. Module 3: Modernity in Interwar Japan: Shiseido & Consumer Culture (Professors Dower, Gordon, Weisenfeld). Exploring the vast archives of the Shiseido cosmetics company opens a fascinating window on the emergence of consumer culture, modern roles for women, and global cosmopolitanism from the 'teens through the 1920s and even into the era of Japanese militarism and aggression in the 1930s. This module will also tap other Visualizing Cultures units on modernization and modernity.

We tend to think of art and technology as two separate, almost opposite things. But what if we showed you that the development of technology owes its debt to artists? And that art would not be what it is, without technology ? "The digital age", born out of the scientific and technological revolutions of the last 500 years, exposes the artificial divergence of disciplinary categories. It is an exciting moment in art and design history. On the one hand, technological tools change what we are capable of doing – and contemporary artists/designers indeed use those technologies with much imagination: from image processing to immersive virtual environments; from social networks to flash mobs and cyber-attacks; from fake news to surveillance systems - art had never had so many tools to play while directly interacting with us within our social realities. On the other hand, art does so while examining, distorting, criticizing and inventing new technologies as it allows us to imagine the furthest frontiers of what technology may be able to do. This course aims to look at these inter-disciplinary cross-overs between art, design and technology while asking: how does this new technological age is changing our culture, society and life? What do these teach us about ourselves? How can we reflect through it about our pasts, presents and futures? The course is aimed at anyone who is curious about what it means to be born and to live in "the digital age". The course combines lectures, interviews with theoreticians and artists, artwork analysis, case studies and stimulating discussions. The course also offers some practical exercises that will introduce you to basics in programming, digital image processing and 3D printing. You would not need preliminary knowledge of art history, but such knowledge may be helpful. This course was created and produced by Shenkar - Engineering. Design. Art.