Comment It's apparently about "narrative" or something (Score 1) 339
Last week there was a prof on NPR talking about this issue, and his take was that professors begin with this great huge un-sequenced body of work in their field, and they go through that work and apply order to it, in the form of narrative arcs, or outlines, or whatever. It is this ordering/editing/sequencing which is the supposed "intellectual property" portion of their lectures.
I was sitting there in the car screaming at the radio "but the fuggin students, in taking their notes, are applying their *own* ordering/editing/sequencing to the profs' lectures--therefore, if the profs can claim IP rights to their interpretations of the source material which they provide in their lectures, then by the same token the students must be allowed to claim IP rights to their own handwritten interpretations of the profs' lectures."
Of course, since we're still waiting for digital radio w/enough bandwidth to actually transmit my real-time bellowing from my car back to NPR in Washington, nobody heard me but me.
Anyway. My dad's a prof and I'm getting ready to go home for Thanksgiving, so I guess I'll ask him what he thinks. When I was teaching freshman english, I didn't give exams, so there wasn't a lot of note-taking going on in my classes to begin with. I hated the whole stupid attend-lecture/cram-notes/regurgitate-on-test cycle when I was in college, so as far as I'm concerned, anything to hasten its demise is more than welcome.
grady
I was sitting there in the car screaming at the radio "but the fuggin students, in taking their notes, are applying their *own* ordering/editing/sequencing to the profs' lectures--therefore, if the profs can claim IP rights to their interpretations of the source material which they provide in their lectures, then by the same token the students must be allowed to claim IP rights to their own handwritten interpretations of the profs' lectures."
Of course, since we're still waiting for digital radio w/enough bandwidth to actually transmit my real-time bellowing from my car back to NPR in Washington, nobody heard me but me.
Anyway. My dad's a prof and I'm getting ready to go home for Thanksgiving, so I guess I'll ask him what he thinks. When I was teaching freshman english, I didn't give exams, so there wasn't a lot of note-taking going on in my classes to begin with. I hated the whole stupid attend-lecture/cram-notes/regurgitate-on-test cycle when I was in college, so as far as I'm concerned, anything to hasten its demise is more than welcome.
grady
