Wednesday, September 15, 2004

I've been 'unblogged' recently because the semester will be starting soon here. (Yikes! It's going to start on Monday!) I'll be teaching Freshman English for Nonmajors again (for the first time in 11 years), a section of Research Methods (I've taught all 4 sections, for the entire sophomore class of English majors, for the last two years--I needed a rest!), and a section of Intercultural Communication.

I've been working mostly on redesigning my Research Methods syllabus. We're going to focus as a class this semester on the topic of "plagiarism, copyright, and intellectual property." I'm going to be putting myself in the interesting position of encouraging students to examine critically the history and politics of plagiarism while at the same time trying to teach them not to plagiarize. We'll also be looking critically at the issue of international copyright, but at the same time I'll be requiring them to buy the textbook (no photocopying allowed). We'll see how that works out... I'll try to provide progress reports if anything interesting is happening.

1 comment:

Jonathan Benda said...

Plagiarism, or "patch writing," as I seem to remember Rebecca Moore Howard talking about it. I seem to remember running across some interesting discussions of copyright in 19th C. popular press, but can't remember the precise issues or the names of publications.
Eric | 09.18.04 - 11:06 am | #

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I'm thinking about using some of Rebecca Howard's writing in my class. We'll see. Also, David Decker, a professor at Tunghai, did some research before on how American publishers were pirating Charles Dickens's books in the 19th century. Ironic, isn't it, how they've changed their minds...
Jon | 09.19.04 - 2:06 am | #