Austin sees Crimson

AUSTIN, Texas — Harvard’s spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship was on full display under the bright late-winter sun of Texas as members of the University’s digital community came together Sunday at the 2013 South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW) in Austin.

Stamping Harvard’s digital presence on the country’s pre-eminent interactive conference, more than 250 alumni, students, faculty, and guests — representing eight of Harvard’s 12 Schools — convened at Icenhauer’s, a 118-year-old house reinvented as a gathering space, for the second annual Digital Harvard in Austin at SXSW, hosted by the Harvard Alumni Association.

As attendees mingled and conversed outdoors, sampling Tex-Mex fare and enjoying the extra hours of daylight, Chief Digital Officer Perry Hewitt remarked that she was “lucky enough to be at Harvard at a time when digital innovation is absolutely everywhere.”

“Harvard today has a significant digital footprint,” she said. “Not only for the 375,000 alumni we have worldwide, but also the people anywhere in the world who are able to connect and engage with Harvard content online.”

Also on hand to address the crowd briefly was David Malan, senior lecturer in computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), whom Hewitt introduced as “part inspirational teacher, part cult leader, and a phenomenal partner at the University.”

Malan is the brains behind the College’s introductory computer science course CS50, as well as its online counterpart, CS50x, which is hosted on the new edX platform, a joint online education venture between Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In his remarks, Malan pointed to a new era of inclusiveness at Harvard for classes that traditionally would have appealed to only the most tech-minded students.

“In recent years, we’ve undertaken an initiative to make CS50 and other courses more broadly accessible to students, irrespective of their backgrounds,” Malan said. “Increasingly, we have students coming in without prior experience who have yet to discover their interest in computer science.”

Malan introduced his crew of undergraduate CS50 teaching fellows,calling the system of young mentors a defining characteristic of the class. He also noted that after “several years of iterations,” the class is now one of the most popular on campus.

Read the entire article in the Harvard Gazette