Some Suggested Directions for Canadian Copyright Law

Israel recently reformed its copyright code, and given that it shares many of the same intellectual property issues as Canada, its path is instructive. Although there is much talk that Canada must adopt DMCA-like anti-circumvention measures (a provision that even authors of the DMCA now disown), it appears that small countries with big knowledge economies can go in other directions. Full details are in the link, but the headlines are:

–strong fair use provisions
–no anticircumvention provision
–permission of parallel imports

I recommend the rather long blog entry by Ariel Katz, a law prof at the University of Toronto, as the act is only available in Hebrew for the moment.

Quebec Alternative

Last night, I attended the vernissage for Quebec Alternative. The exhibit shows off some of the materials in Marc Raboy’s collection of alternative publications, which he dutifully stockpiled — eventually renting a storage locker until he was able to donate them to the McGill Library. For last night’s event, many key figures in Quebec’s alternative print media culture of the 1970s turned out, and a few spoke. I was struck how every local “of a certain age” I met at the event either played a role in one of the publications or said something along the lines of “I remember picking up one of these” and pointing at something in a case. One librarian told me the university archivist in the 1970s would go around campus each week and pick up all the publications he could — they are probably still somewhere in the archives.

So much of this kind of left wing history is lost, because the publications are treated as ephemera and nobody bothered collecting or curating them (except, of course, for the RCMP during the October Revolution, but they were confiscating, not collecting), and institutions like McGill have only just begun the long process of documenting this radical history. Many of these publications were tied to movements or organization that helped to define modern Quebec as a secular, progressive society.

There are other histories, I’m sure, but the home team (ie, Marc) published a book in 1983 called Movements and Messages (the English translation appeared in 1984) that documents a good deal of the history in the exhibition. It’s also an interesting example of 1980s Marxist communications scholarship.

As I stood at the event, I wondered a bit about the future history of radical online publications. On the one hand, they are considerably more available to their readerships so long as someone keeps a server active and the code is up to date enough to run with current browsers. On the other, many more of them will not outlive the infrastructure that sustains them. And blogs, well, the personal is always more ephemeral than the collective.

More on Coverage

There are some excellent comments in the thread for my post on lecturing and retention. The question seems to be: is coverage more important in fields with strong canons, and what’s the alternative?

My sense is this:

Physics has as strong a “canon” as any humanities field, so the issues of core curriculum seem as relevant there as anywhere for an intro-level course. I think it’s a balancing act. Students ought to be exposed to key authors and ideas in whatever field, and it’s not a matter of simply reducing us all to “critical thinking”; but I do believe each field, in addition to its particular texts and theories, offers students training in a way of thinking about the questions it poses. To me, that’s the jackpot. It’s a standard conceit of liberal arts education that our goal is to create free thinkers; that may be our goal, but it can only be accomplished through training people to think in a disciplined fashion. To use an analogy of musical improvisation: the best improvisers know their instruments inside and out and have mastered basic techniques, harmony, etc.

That said, most intro survey courses in the humanities are like smorgasbords, and I tend to think that the sampling is the thing here. They don’t have to remember or know everything (and you can’t control what they’ll remember), but my hope is that each student will leave with exposure to lots of ideas and having engaged seriously with a select few. So I simply try and include ideas worth remembering or thinking about.

How to Read a Book in Less than an Hour

Chris Kelty’s advice. I haven’t tried his method though I have my own “plowing” methods which I may detail at a later date if I decide there’s something original in it. I tend to real slowly and obsessively when I teach.

Leaving aside dull and moralistic arguments about how much effort should be expended in an encounter with a book (though I had a good laugh over Elephant’s entry), the one potentially fatal flaw in this method is the index. Indexing is itself a black art; authors are rarely good indexers when they finish their first book (I know from experience) and professional indexers often don’t “get” the real stakes in the book.

Still, it’s a way LESS imperfect pedagogical method than, say, not giving the students any idea of how to slog through a massive pile of reading in a week and then acting like a big shot. Not that profs ever do that in grad seminars.

I look forward to Kelty’s other promised pedagogical tips, including

how I teach the students to grade their own papers. I can’t even remember the last time I read a student’s paper

and then there’s my method for teaching them to reason by avoiding valid inference of any kind and my method for picking a research topic by using the LOC Wheel of Fortune, and my method for reading by running an automatic co-occurence algorithm on a text and talking only about the top five results.

Lecturing and Killing the “Coverage” idea

I don’t think I’ve written about this, but I am obsessed with large lecture pedagogy. Although a sizeable number of students in my intro class seem to really like it (although liking isn’t the point necessarily) and I get good ratings, I have always been interested in how to be a better teacher. The thing is that a great deal of academic pedagogical theory has been written as if we all teach small classes. The reality, however, is somewhat different. Happily, some people at McGill have realized this and started occasionally having lectures and events that discuss large lecture pedagogy.

Today was one such an event, a lecture by Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard, who used to lecture but doesn’t anymore. Instead, he will start a class off with a few brief notes, then post a multiple choice question. Students would be given a clicker and with some software, they could see the aggregate answers for the question. Then, they would have to convince their neighbor of their answer, and the whole class would then answer the question again. Basically, class would be a series of these exercises. Mazur’s theory is that the students who know what they’re doing convince the students who don’t, and his data suggest that students wind up with better comprehension of the material (as opposed to the regurgitation of information they’ve gleaned). I haven’ explained his method well but you can visit his site to learn more.

But there were a couple things I left thinking about (I left “early” — an hour into the presentation, as the room was so stuffy I thought I might faint). First, while this is clearly translatable to the humanities, there are issues about the weight of ideology, and whether rational arguments will win out as often when students are first exposed to the material before they’ve had it explained (if, for instance, they don’t understand the language in “Encoding/Decoding” it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to argue about it. So perhaps some information transmission is good.

The other thing that was striking was Mazur’s finding that retention of material from introductory courses is very low. A year after the class, sometimes only two months later, students who passed an introductory large lecture course in physics will likely “remember nothing but the pain and the grade.” With his method, retention is somewhat higher though not that high. Which leads me to conclude what I’ve always suspected: the very idea of “coverage” is somewhat bogus, because students don’t hold onto the material. It’s better to teach them a way of thinking or simply introduce skepticism, and hope that they retain a few of the ideas you throw at them over the course of the term. That doesn’t mean one should teach narrow courses, only that we shouldn’t try to live up to an impossible idea of comprehensiveness that turns out not to matter.