Group items tagged

In ordinary language, to call a copyright a "property" right is a bit misleading, for the property of copyright is an odd kind of property. . . . I understand what I am taking when I take the picnic table you put in your backyard. I am taking a thing, the picnic table, and after I take it, you don't have it. But what am I taking when I take the good idea you had to put a picnic table in the backyard—by, for example, going to Sears, buying a table, and putting it in my backyard? What is the thing that I am taking then? The point is not just about the thingness of picnic tables versus ideas, though that is an important difference. The point instead is that in the ordinary case—indeed, in practically every case except for a narrow range of exceptions—ideas released to the world are free. I don't take anything from you when I copy the way you dress—though I might seem weird if I do it every day. . . . Instead, as Thomas Jefferson said (and this is especially true when I copy the way someone dresses), "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

arguments that Lessig has with the hard-core proponents of intellectual property are almost all arguments about where and when the line should be drawn between the right to copy and the right to protection from copying, not whether a line should be drawn.

when it comes to literature, we have somehow decided that copying is never acceptable.

A successful music executive has to understand the distinction between borrowing that is transformative and borrowing that is merely derivative, and that distinction, I realized, was what was missing from the discussion of Bryony Lavery's borrowings.

problem with plagiarism. It is not merely extremist. It has also become disconnected from the broader question of what does and does not inhibit creativity.

But the truth is that Lavery has every right to create an affair for Agnetha, because Agnetha is not Dorothy Lewis. She is a fictional character, drawn from Lewis's life but endowed with a completely imaginary set of circumstances and actions.

dred and seventy-five rather ordinary words could bring the walls tumbling down.

only 2 percent of students said they bought an e-textbook this past fall semester.

The City University of New York, for instance, is looking closely at encouraging e-textbooks as part of an effort to lower student costs. "At end of the day, it's how do you drive savings for our students, who are feeling a great economic impact," said Brian Cohen, CUNY's chief information officer.

If students do buy them and begin to carry them around campus, they could be a more powerful educational tool than laptop computers.

Jim Groom, an instructional technologist at the University of Mary Washington, expressed weariness with all the hype around the Apple announcement. He said he is concerned about Apple's policies of requiring all applications to be approved by the company before being allowed in its store, just as it does with the iPhone. And he said that Apple's strategy is to make the Web more commercial, rather than an open frontier. "It offers a real threat to the Web," he said.

He also pointed out that several PC manufacturers have sold tablet computers before, which have been tried enthusiastically in classrooms. Their promise is that they make it easy for professors to walk around classrooms while holding the computer, while allowing them to wirelessly project information to a screen at the front of the room. But despite initial hype, very few PC tablets are being used in college classrooms, he said. Now that Apple's long-awaited secret is out, the harder questions might be whether the iPad is the long-awaited education computer.

practice at retrieval has been shown to be more effective than merely spending more time studying the material without actively engaging in memory retrieval.

By doing so repeatedly, especially in varied contexts, the learner strengthens access to this information,

given minimal cues

two different effects. One is the "testing effect," in which intervening tests improves learning of concepts that are retrieved from memory

when intervening tests are spaced, two tests were more effective than a single test in improving long-term retention of material.

Compared to a cued-recall or recognition intervening test, a free-recall test produced better performance on a final test, regardless of the format of the final test.

Educational Applications

Align lectures, assignments and tests, so that important information will have to be remembered at different times

Have students retrieve this information in multiple ways by either varying the questions or context in which it is assessed:

During lectures, ask students questions to elicit responses that reflect understanding of previously introduced course material.

This serves the dual purpose of probing students' knowledge, so that misconceptions can be directly and immediately addressed in the lecture.

On homework assignments, have students retrieve key information from lectures and readings.

Chapter summaries, for instance, may include study questions that ask students to recall major points or conclusions to be drawn from the reading.

Encourage group studying in which students actively discuss course topics

test questions offer another opportunity for "practice at retrieval,"

Ideally tests should be cumulative and test items should probe for understanding of the material.