I’m delivering an interactive computer training course to a group of young adults shortly. I’ll be using this blog to list topics covered and interesting links discovered.

Starting off with a few handy links for graphics creation:
Banner Maker – http://www.puresilvabannermaker.com/banner_maker.asp
Cooltext image generator – http://cooltext.com/
Newspaper Headline generator – http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp
Talking image generator – http://www.fodey.com/generators/animated/talking_tomato.asp
Wanted Poster + Other frames Generator – http://www.tuxpi.com/
Image creator – http://www.says-it.com/

Web site host – http://www.webs.com

My site – http://mikederham.webs.com/

HISTORY:

The concept of Copyright came into effect worldwide from 1910. The first law passed and accepted globally was that of Buenos Airos convention. The Universal Copyright Convention was introduced in 1952.

COPYRIGHT REGULATIONS IN INDIA:

The Indian copyright Law is in effect from 1957. This Law, is framed in par with that of Britain’s Copyright law.

Summary

• Literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works (other than photographs) – Sixty years from the beginning of the calendar year following the year in which the author dies. This will usually be more than sixty years as the time frame starts subsequent to the author’s death.
• Anonymous/pseudonymous/posthumous works, photographs, movies, sound recordings – Sixty years from the beginning of the year following the year of publication.
• Section 32 states that anyone can apply to the copyright Board for a license to translate works seven years after first publication. Royalties will need to be paid to the Copyright owner and the royalty is determined by the Copyright Board and not the author. There are several conditions that have to be met before this applies and there are automatic termination clauses.

Compiled by: KD Shijo

What Is Copyright?

“Copyright is a legal device that provides the creator of a work of art or literature, or a work that conveys information or ideas, the right to control how the work is used.” Stephen Fishman, Esq. The Copyright Handbook, 1996.

What Cannot be Copyrighted?

• Works in the public domain:
  • Ideas are in the public domain.
  • Facts are in the public domain.
  • Words, names, slogans, or other short phrases also cannot be copyrighted. However, slogans, for example, can be protected by trademark law.
  • Blank forms.
  • Government works, which include:
    • Judicial opinions.
    • Public ordinances.
    • Administrative rulings.
  • Works created by federal government employees as part of their official responsibility.
  • Works for which copyright wasn’t obtained or copyright has expired (extremely rare!).

What Does Copyright Protect?

The four basic protections are:

• The right to make copies of the work.
• The right to sell or otherwise distribute copies of the work.
• The right to prepare new works based on the protected work.

• The right to perform the protected work (such as a stage play or painting) in public.

THE EDUCATIONAL MULTIMEDIA GUIDELINES

The guidelines are intended to apply to educational multimedia projects that incorporate educators’ original material, such as course notes or commentary, together with various copyrighted media formats, including motion media, music, text material, and graphics illustrations.

Definition

TYPES OF MEDIA AND PERMISSIBLE

• Motion media:

Up to 10 percent of the total or three minutes, whichever is less

• Music, lyrics, and music video:
  • up to 10 percent of the work but no more than 30 seconds of the music or lyrics from an individual musical work.

• Copying of a multimedia project:

no more than two copies may be made of a project

When Should You Get Permission?

• When you intend to use the project for commercial or noneducational purposes.
• When you intend to duplicate the project beyond the two copies allowed by the guidelines.

                                                                      COMPILED BY-GAURITA MANJREKAR

Authentic materials refer to the type of material which are not designed to teach but comprise of all features of real-life listening. They are not scripted and contain false start, redundancy, incomplete sentences and therefore give opportunity to learners to be exposed to real life communication. There is a debate on the view that these materials can be difficult for learners especially beginners. However, there are a number of studies who recommend to either grade (simplified) the language of the authentic material or the task so that the learners may not find it difficult and do not get demotivated. It seems that if we want learners to improve their listening skills, it is quite important to expose them to real life listening. Because communication is a two-way process and the ELT text material does not really prepare students for the communication outside the classroom. In order to prepare learners to communicate in the real world with native speakers, it is useful to at least expose them to these kinds of materials.

Professor Wade Hands has a new outline for his Economics and Philosophy Course.  Click here in order to see it. (I thank Prof. Hands for making this outline available for our readers.)

Visit our Course Syllabi page for more course outlines!

Where will this discussion of the UNIVERSE appear?

Reading Daniel Bell’s book it has struck me that his points about East-West human rights dialogue can be generalized to other areas of one’s life where successful communication between parties is required. The most immediate connection that came to my mind while reading was the teacher-student relationship – how should we, as teachers, approach our students with the lessons that we have prepared for them to learn?

One of Bell’s major “take home points” is that values are locally grown. As a result, when human rights advocates come into a local situation wielding their normative beliefs and standards and apply them judgmentally to a given foreign local context, they fail in both of their aims, which are: (a) to convert the local population to belief in their standards and (b) to bring the practices there in line with what those standards would demand.

Bell’s point is that (a) is doomed because values are local – it makes little sense to simply come onto the scene and inform people of what their values should be. This is not how value-commitments originate. Instead, they are naturally connected with historical and cultural narratives intrinsic to those local communities, and as such cannot be divorced from them. His claim to (b) is similar, but here he is claiming that psychological commitment to a value system is generated from local concerns and historical and cultural narratives. Thus, not only is it the case that the actual status of value commitments (whether they are authentic or not) is a function of their local emergence, but it is also the case that psychological motivation to orient oneself in accord with this practice or that one can be a function of how well one is capable of “fitting it in” with one’s cultural narrative (that one is immersed in as a member of that local community).

–

This makes me think of teaching immediately, and how difficult it is. Especially for someone who, like me, teaches ethics regularly. The central problem is this: how do you get students to actually think about these values and norms in a serious way? How do you get them to rethink their own lives? How do you get them to make decisive commitments to be better people?

I know some instructors who try the “attack” methodology. When presented with some practice or behavior that the instructor finds unsavory (and that students participate in), the instructor asks for “arguments” for this view. When presented with them, the teacher demolishes them (sometimes using the arguments of the authors being read in class), and afterward looks out on the room wondering if anyone is willing to still commit to the kind of life he/she just showed to be logically flawed. I mean – who would want to “out” themselves as living a logically inconsistent life, right?

Though I am a philosopher, and I obviously love and appreciate arguments, it has struck me more and more over the years that very few people I know are committed to their moral claims and views because they, over time, seemed to stand up the best against counter argumentation. Very few people assemble premises and say “aha! – practice X follows from this! I commit to X now!” If anything, we start with conclusions first, and then only later (perhaps after being prodded to do so by some pinhead philosophy professor) assemble “arguments” to be trotted out when required. As a result, it is not surprising that when these arguments are demolished, the commitment to the values and norms remains, much to the frustration of philosophy professors everywhere.

–

This strikes me as somewhat related to what Bell is saying. Students, like anyone else, generate value commitments from their own local environments. There is a “narrative” for that student that tells him/her who she is, and how her life is put together in an orderly sensible way. That narrative hooks up, in some cases, with a larger cultural narrative about what it means to be a self, what it means to live a meaningful life, and so on. It is somewhat futile to try and convince a student that the selfishness that starts with him or herself as an “independent atomic entity” is wrongheaded when this is, after all, the narrative through which they understand themselves and the world.

Instead, if Bell is right, we need to be able to understand our students much better. We need to see the worlds in which they are immersed. We need to dig into the narratives (even the sub-generational ones) that are deeply interwoven into their senses of selfhood. Only from there can we hope to get students to see how the new value systems we are presenting to them matter or are important. But this will require “local knowledge” – we’ll have to use both the local realities of the student’s life, coupled together with a way of connecting up what the authors say to the narratives through which they understand themselves. Only in this way can we hope to be effective at all.

Thinking in terms of my Existentialism post, and also my post on local knowledge, I wonder: how many of us teachers are really just “dabblers” who are “playing at being serious” at the task of teaching? We have a lot of “knowledge to impart” to the natives, of course. We’ve collected our degrees that inform us that we are specialists in “the gossip” or “idle talk” of the philosophical community.

I have no doubt that I am guilty. I find myself at times having no desire to immerse myself into the worlds of my students. I don’t want to take those sorts of risks with my time and efforts. Perhaps part of it is a desire not to take the risk of exposing myself to other value systems. After all, at 42, you start to get a bit comfortable with your own. Perhaps part of it is arrogance. I think my own commitments are true; they don’t need to be hooked up with “local values” in order to be effective. Like the philosophy teacher who tries to convince through logical argumentation, I think they are a priori convincing.

In these senses, perhaps ineffective teaching can be like the situation of the ineffective human rights theorist that Bell talks about. Perhaps we as teachers, like the human rights theorist, need to be more open to what we can learn from other cultures, or our students in this case.

But what investment this requires! Who is up to this task?

In the last few days I’ve learned that Tsinghua may not want me to teach the culture class I was scheduled for next semester — instead they want me to teach Chinese Philosophy. This is fine with me, and would likely be a lot of fun, but I’ve never taught this as a standalone course. Instead, I’ve taught courses that deal with a focused area within Chinese philosophy (such as my “Confucian Virtue Ethics” course) or that deal with a wider Asian theme (such as my “Asian Ethics” course that also covers Indian thinkers). So if I do wind up teaching this course, I’ll have to build it quickly, which means selecting the right books and figuring out which thinkers to cover.

1. Who?

I would certainly stick with pre-Qin, as I don’t feel confident with the neo-Confucians at this point (maybe after sabbatical). So this leaves the big seven: Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Mozi, Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Han Feizi. Given the total hours of the course over the semester (2 credit hours a week), I don’t think I could cover all seven without being overly superficial. Five seems more reasonable. I certainly would cover Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi and Laozi. Which one of the remaining three? Mozi?

Of course, if anyone has a different set of five that they would cover, I’d be interested in seeing which five of the seven you’d pick, and why.

2. Primary Texts

I’m pretty sure that — although I am not a fan of reading “selections” from works — I would use Ivanhoe’s and Van Norden’s Classics of Chinese Philosophy. Unless there are some better ones out there? I’d prefer to have an anthology, just to make things easier given the situation.

3. Secondary Texts

I’ve used Joel’s (Kupperman) book before, Classic Asian Philosophy, and found it helpful (in “Asian Ethics”), but I need something more in-depth for a course like this (also, Joel’s book doesn’t cover all the authors I would teach). Looking around, I’ve come across three, but I’m not familiar with any of them. They are:

1. Fung Yu-Lan’s A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (1948, reprinted 1997). I know many people like the book, but it seems more theme based and covers lots of topics I would likely skip over. So is it a good book to use as a secondary text if you just want to move from author to author?

2. JeeLoo Liu’s An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy (2006). Shirong Luo seems to like the book as a whole, even if he has some quibbles with the particular arguments or interpretations Liu advances. Luo dislikes the fact that the book fails to cover neo-Confucianism, but I only intend on covering pre-Qin, so that’s fine by me.

3. Karen Lai’s An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy (2008). Couldn’t uncover any thing about this one – it might be too new.

If anyone has any ideas on any of these different questions, I’d be grateful!

English Litterature Course (0168-MK2010)

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Pdf: questionnaire-modular-planning

As I read the Theravada Buddhist work the Dhammapada, I find myself thinking of Kierkegaard. Specifically, I find myself thinking of Abraham and the Knight of Faith, and the relationship between their predicament (as described by Kierkegaard) and the life-situation of the potential Buddhist Arahant. Both typologies, the Buddhist and the Existentialist, seem to me to offer as an ideal a way of “walking betwixt the two worlds” in which one lives as the being that one is.

Without going into too much detail, Kierkegaard’s Abraham (the potential “knight of faith”) is asked by God to kill the one thing that he loves the most — his son Isaac. Of course, as the story goes, he does so, or at least he tries to do so and is stopped at the last moment by an angel. What is remarkable about the story of Abraham, however, is often mistaken to be the actual action of the attempted murder. In truth, the “miracle” occurs afterward, in the story not told – in the lived experiences of Abraham from that point on after the big story is over, when he is back and re-engaged in the day-to-day of his normal family routine.

What is remarkable about his life emerges when we reflect on why we feel bad for Abraham. How can he enjoy being a father to this son any longer, when he has already abdicated this role on Mt. Moriah? Isn’t he miserable, in a way, realizing that there’s something about his relationship to his son that is now dead and not retrievable? After all — he was willing to kill him! We feel as if he is doomed to a life of resignation. Kierkegaard tells that our fears are misplaced. Abraham (like Camus’ Sisyphus) is happy. His relationship with his son, as a matter of fact, is intensified to a degree that it never reached before.

The Kierkegaard story is complicated (shameless plug for my book here, which explains it!). But the bottom line is something like this: Abraham has learned to live in the tension between two worlds. On the one hand, he is in the physical world in which he experiences connection to his son. He is, in this sense, “of the world” and so naturally forms bonds with it. But at the same time, he realizes that he is not “of the world” at all because he is also outside of it as well, independent of it. What he is, in a sense, is fundamentally disconnected from that world.

In a way, Abraham, after the encounter, learns that Issac is not his. He does not own his son. In fact, he learns that Issac is not “his son” because nothing is properly “his” at all. Abraham gives up control, he gives up possession. He realizes that Issac is God’s, and that everything about his relationship to the world is fleeting and, at any moment, the result of a kind of divine grace. Thus, it appears that one must be able to “join the two worlds” (being in and being out) without resolving the tension between them, and without rejecting one for the other.

I’m not suggesting that the Dhammapada is an Existential text, but it does have some similar themes. The Arahant (the Buddhist’s sage) too is called upon to be in the world while out of it. A central theme is to not form attachments to the world because such attachments speak of a kind of misguided egoism that the sage labors to be rid of. In poem five, “The Fool,” we read:

The Arahant here is called to renounce his/her “self” as a fiction (Sage as Humean bundle!); as a result, one recognizes that one cannot “have” anything at all because there’s no subject to do the possessing. As a result, possession, in a world of no-self (anatman), is incoherent. It is a fiction that leads to illusions of control and a desire for permanence in an impermanent world, fictions that lead to suffering.

But yet, Buddha doesn’t advise us to flee from the world. He tells us in poem 8 (“Thousands) that:

One way to read this is that it is a celebration of one of the three jewels, the life of Buddha, who was once separated from “arising and passing” and then was exposed to it, an exposure that led him to later become Enlightened.

But another way to see this is to suggest that the Arahant is “in the world” — and as a result is exposed, just as everyone else is, to what normally goes on within that world. Just as Abraham forms connections with his son, the Arahant lives in a world of change and impermanence. He/She does not avoid it.

At the same time, in poem 13 (“The World”):

Of course, as any reader of the Dhammapada knows, there are endless verses like this one, calling on the person to detach from the world in the sense of not desiring it, or wanting to possess it or control it. Good “connection” with the world is the kind of connection that is “not-connected” in a sense; it is the kind of relationship that is passive and open to impermanence. Engaged but not attached. Passionate but not connected.

Like the Knight of Faith, the Arahant lives “betwixt” two worlds in a flurry of descriptions (like “passionate but not connected”) that seem hard to get one’s head around, if not one’s practices.

This is not an uncommon theme in these kinds of works (works that deal with meaning of life issues). In them, we often get a two world view:

The world of the animal. In this purely “physical” world, we are almost deterministically carried about, living in a blind way motivated by sensory pursuits only. When humans live in this world, we reduce ourselves to the life of the dog, or the slug, being moved only what things external to us in a law-like scientific fashion (in accord with the natural laws of the universe).

The world of the Gods. The Gods, in a sense, are moved only by reason (a Kantian fantasy?), or by some other form of non-sensual motivator. They are freed from the world entirely and the physical (and psychological) laws that govern it.

Humans, on this view, live in the middle. We are not Gods, but we are not animals either. So living as a human being means to live “betwixt” the two, in the tension (as an Existentialist would put it) and in the midst of the contradictions that emerge from living between two polar opposite forms of existing.

I certainly see this in both the Buddhist and the Existentialist, but my wonder about this way of talking goes further: is it really possible to live in this way? Can we be Abrahams? Knights of Faith? Arahants? Is it possible to “be attached without desire” or to “love one’s son but at the same time renounce him”? Or are these ways of talking just useful fictions of sorts?

Moreover: is it really admirable or praiseworthy to try to live in the middle of such worlds?

StraighterLine (www.straighterline.com), a new online education solution that provides students a high quality, better supported, and lower cost way to obtain college credits through regionally accredited colleges and universities, has announced that McGraw-Hill, a leading global provider of electronic and print products for the pre-K through 12th grade, higher education and professional markets and course material provider for StraighterLine, has won awards in the Software and Information Industry Association’s (SIIA) 23rd Annual CODiE Awards competition. McGraw-Hill won “Best Postsecondary Course or Learning Management Solution” and “Best Postsecondary Instructional Solution.”

This is the second consecutive year a company associated with StraighterLine has won a CODiE Award. SMARTHINKING, a market leader in providing online tutoring and academic support to students, won in 2007 for “Best Instruction for Students at Home.” This recognized the company as the best educational technology system that extends traditional learning in the home.

McGraw-Hill and SMARTHINKING provide the company with course material and online educators, respectively. McGraw-Hill provides course material for StraighterLine’s four entry-level curriculum courses where credit can be transferred: College Algebra, English Composition, Economics 101 and Accounting 101. SMARTHINKING provides experienced and trained online educators who are the primary instructional contact for students. All of the educators must successfully complete a rigorous online training program and are subject to on-going evaluation and professional development activities. The instructors are available 24/7, seven days a week.

StraighterLine allows students to receive credit from the company’s regionally accredited partner colleges or allows students to transfer to non-partner colleges that recognize StraighterLine’s courses as equivalent programs. The company’s partner colleges include Fort Hays State University, Jones International University, Potomac College and most recently Grand Canyon University, a private non-denominational Christian University in Phoenix, Ariz.

Additional information on the StraighterLine program can be found at www.straighterline.com or by visiting the StraighterLine blog at www.mmimarketing.com/blog/?author=straighterline.

Related Links:
www.straighterline.com
www.smarthinking.com
www.mheducation.com/home/index.shtml
www.siia.net
www.siia.net/Codies/2008
www.mmimarketing.com/blog/?author=straighterline
www.mmimarketing.com

Quotes:
“We are proud to partner with two award-winning companies to provide our students with exceptional course material,” said Ryan Busch, director of StraighterLine. “We feel that partnering with these innovative and quality companies will enhance our programs and improve the academic support StraighterLine offers its students.”

About StraighterLine:
StraighterLine provides students with a new online option for obtaining required college credits from accredited colleges and universities. StraighterLine’s affordable courses are the first to include up to 24/7 live, on-demand instruction. StraighterLine offers six entry-level college courses, including College Algebra, English Composition I, Accounting I, Accounting II, Economics I: Macroeconomics and Economics II: Microeconomics, and two developmental courses, with many more planned. StraighterLine students may choose to receive credit from StraighterLine’s regionally accredited partner colleges. Student-earned credits may also be transferable to non-partner colleges that recognize StraighterLine’s partner’s courses as equivalent programs. There are no set due dates for StraighterLine courses. Students may start and stop at any point with up to six months of access.