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Email, long seen as the scapegoat in the downfall of the US Postal Service, could be its savior, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.

Shiva Ayyadurai, who was the first to copyright the term "EMAIL," is working on a proposal for the USPS to enter the email management industry, reports The Tech, MIT's student-run newspaper. Ayyadurai says the typical flood of daily email is too much for the typical company to handle, meaning important messages get lost or misdelivered.

The announcement of the MITx initiative last week has several important aspects, but it is nowhere near what we have been doing at the Open University in the UK for decades. It is somewhat premature, lacks any real understanding of the issues involved in assessment, and contains an uneven mix of pedagogy as well.

First, they admit that the announcement is bordering on premature in their so-called FAQs (although how anybody has had time to ask any question frequently before something has been launched is a mystery). MIT appears not to have worked out how to deliver anything more than what's available through Open CourseWare (OCW).

The takeaway from an MIT study released Wednesday, tracking the early growth of Twitter, is that new Web technologies - particularly social networks that rely on adoption by other users - cannot depend solely on online buzz (or even Ashton Kutcher, for that matter).

The study tracked data from 2006 to 2009 in the 408 U.S. cities with the highest rates of Twitter adoption. The findings clearly demonstrate that mainstream media mentions, coupled with the geographic and socioeconomic proximity of users, fueled its growth. A video mapping the data shows initial growth in San Francisco, where Twitter is based, then spreading to Boston.

Kevin Kelly wrote a thought-provoking post about how "the impossible" is happening more often nowadays, thanks in no small part to large scale collaboration over the Internet. In other words, the hive mind. He cites eBay and Wikipedia as two examples of things he would've thought impossible in decades past.

Collaboration over the Web is still evolving. One way it might be immediately improved is by adding more women to collective intelligence projects and by shutting up the loud mouths. I'm not idly speculating here, those were the findings of a recent study by MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has announced the creation of a new Center for Mobile Learning. The center will be housed at the MIT Media Lab. Google supported the creation of the center with a grant from Google University Relations. The center's first project will be the adoption and further development of App Inventor for Android, a do-it-yourself tool for building apps for Google's Android mobile OS with no programming skills required.

App Inventor was a Google Labs project that was discontinued last week, but Google open-sourced the code. The MIT Center for Mobile Learning's adoption of the code comes as a relief to fans of App Inventor, many of whom worried that no one would step up to carry on its development.

For a long time, it was the folks who downloaded music or movies illegally that faced the wrath of government prosecutors. So the unsealing of an indictment today against Aaron Swartz, former Reddit-er and founder of Demand Progress, for the illegal download of some 4 million-odd academic journal articles may sound a bit unusual.

Demand Progress has issued a statement suggesting Swartz's actions were akin to "checking too many books out of the library." But the government clearly disagrees as the charges include wire fraud, computer fraud, and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. Schwartz now faces up to 35 years in prison and up to $1 million in fines.

Although it's getting a lot easier to build your own video games, many of the tools out there for doing so require you have a background in programming. Not so with with Stencyl, a new game creation studio that launches today.

"Our goal is to build the ultimate game creation experience, one that democratizes the game creation process by eliminating all technical barriers, leaving one's imagination as the limiting factor," says Stencyl co-founder Jonathan Chung.

A delightful book that should be on your summer reading list, or a potential gift for your favorite geek, is a new offering from MIT Press called
Nightwork: A History of Hack and Pranks at MIT. (updated link) For those of us that went to lesser engineering schools (or perhaps greater, depending on our metrics), it is a joyful experience. The author, school historian TF Peterson, has copiously illustrated some of the more fantastic and amusing things that students have cooked up over the years, including nailing someone's dorm furniture to the underside of the Media Lab archway, putting various objects on top of the two domes at the school, playing Al Gore buzzword bingo at commencement, and more.

In time for the one-year anniversary of the destructive Haiti earthquake, a group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's MediaLab have rolled out Konbit, an expansive work database for those effected by the devastation, usable by those with computers and without, by those literate and illiterate. Aaron Zinman, a grad student who, along with Greg Elliott, developed the site, explained the opportunity.

"Normally (non-governmental organizations) organizations import foreign labor into Haiti due to the difficulty of finding local talent -- a problem we are trying to combat."

As we wrote earlier this month, MIT OpenCourseWare is one of the most popular site for learners to freely access university course materials, with over 70 million visitors to the site from all over the world. Yet despite the increasing popularity (and push, by the likes of the Gates Foundation's new initiative) for opencourseware, one of the downsides has long been that the materials - syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, exams - are presented in a static and solitary fashion.

There has been no mechanism for instruction for and no interaction among MIT OCW students. Until now.