By Violeta Ivanova, OEIT
December 22, 2010

The MIT Council for Educational Technology (MITCET) and OEIT are pleased to announce that Michael (Mitcho) Yoshitaka Erlewine ‘G, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, has been awarded the 2010 Microsoft Research iCampus Technology Innovation Student Prize (the icampus student prize) for his work on “Sustainable Web Development for the MIT Community Using WordPress”.

Mitcho Erlewine’s programming work was essential for the creation and deployment of three online educational resources that were built on the WordPress web-publishing platform: the Edgerton Digital Collection, which featured over 8,000 photographs and 12,000 pages of Doc Edgerton’s research notebooks, made public for the first time through this site; the MIT Math CI Space, which enables instructors in the Department of Mathematics to share resources and best practices for teaching communication-intensive mathematics courses; and the MIT Shakespeare Project, which catalogs information on unique Shakespeare performances and interpretations from around the world.

Mr. Erlewine’s work included data structure architecture, metadata synchronization, and enhancements to the WordPress platform such as new functionalities for Creative Commons licensing, batch file upload and download, and certificate authentication and authorization. Through free, public distribution of component functionality as WordPress plugins, the technology innovations are shared with the greater WordPress and academic communities.