These are some of my postings on this topic:
Posted Date: September 29, 2012 9:19 PM
Mark,
I appreciate the description of your wife’s Hamlet assignment using Twitter. Many years ago I remember completing a similar assignment except that we wrote personal letters from a character’s point of view. Sure…a real departure from the traditional Hamlet essay or multiple choice test but, in my mind, a much deeper and more meaningful assignment that required higher level thinking. Using Twitter is a great update on this assignment. A personal letter hooked my generation and Twitter will do it for this one. I am reminded of the anti-technologists throughout history, who, if they had had there way, would have prevented the publishing and mass distribution of Hamlet in the first place. Do you think Shakespeare would have posted his plays to Youtube? I think so, he didn’t seem to shy away from producing something popular or controversial. Wish I was in your wife’s class.
Don
Posted Date: September 27, 2012 10:10 PM
Catherine,
As I completed this weeks readings, I too wondered about the possibility to truly own an idea. I found the words of Thomas Jefferson as quoted in The Economy of Ideas (Barlow),compelling: “That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe…seems to have been…designed by nature…like fire…expansible over all space without lessening their density at any point…like the air in which we breathe…incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.” Pretty heady stuff but it seems right to me. Ideas are as essential as air and as life-sustaining as fire. Consider Filippo Brunelleschi’s ground breaking discovery of perspective and his development of its mathematical formulas in the late early15th century. Without his flash of insight and hard work, images and graphics would still be flat. Is his worked credited and are royalties paid to his descendants by companies who make and market video games? Probably not, and we might not expect it. But when does an idea or technique become public property? After 50 years, as reported by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, or after 500 years? Or to paraphrase Jefferson, once it has been shared? When is an idea no longer worth protecting? I do believe that an individual’s work should be protected and compensated and I thank the pirates for their boundary defining contributions. I, for one, will read my software licenses and agreements more carefully.
Regarding plagiarism, piracy, and re-mixing, I agree with your comment that we must teach or student the differences between them. I think part of the problem lies in the kinds of assignments we give students. Asking students to report the facts and re-state the ideas of others (in their own words, of course) encourages a lazy response. We need to set the bar a bit higher. Tasks that require application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation (thank you, Benjamin Bloom, et al.) demonstrate knowledge and comprehension and so much more. Not as easy to objectify and mark on a scale but a much more desirable an outcome.
And finally, the other night my wife and I were debating the benefits of technology. She is my muse and my best critic. As a found myself unable to counter some of her well articulated, anti-technology comments, TED Talks came to the rescue. Check out Jay Bradner’s presentation on open-source cancer research.
Timely, given our readings this week and I was able to score a couple of point for the benefits of technology.
Don – 422 words; I am closing in on the 250 word mark 🙂