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Lessig appearance meme

Submitted by Rodney Herring on February 14, 2007 - 1:34pm. |

So Lawrence Lessig will be on campus next Tuesday (2/20), and he will be speaking at 7pm in Hogg Auditorium, which most of you know. Since RHE 306 students are required to attend, I assume that 306 instructors will want to build some class time around discussing his talk. This may take the form of set-up before the event or follow-up after the event.

In any case, I think we could help each other by sharing our ideas here on the blog. So if you’re planning to prepare for Lessig’s talk by discussing the text in advance, how do you plan to do so? Will you have your students prepare questions they might ask, for instance? On the other hand, if you intend to save the discussion for follow-up, do you have specific ideas for making the discussion fruitful? Will you still ask students to listen for particular arguments or topics? Do you have any special activities planned?

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Possible Idea

Submitted by gavinbenke on February 14, 2007 - 2:39pm.

Good point that Lessig's talk is an opportunity that should not be missed.

One thing I did last semester was to introduce Unit 2 by showing two video clips to the class. Both were on the same subject, but one was essentially one emotional appeal after another and full of logical fallacies. The other clip was a reasoned, logical argument supported by evidence. The class response was positive and it generated a lot of discussion. Perhaps this time around, I'll use Lessig as one of the examples and show something else for comparison.

Thoughts?

I'd also love to hear what other people are planning on doing to fold Lessig's talk into the classroom.

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Other ideas

Submitted by andrewjones on February 16, 2007 - 12:14pm.

I'm thinking of a multimedia festival with legal mash-ups (the wonderful 2ManyDJs) and some video of Lessig from YouTube. Only one person in my class knew what a mash-up was, perhaps counteracting Lessig's claim that we live in a "cut and paste" culture...:-)

My discussions in the past have attempted to personalize the issues in the book for the students. My impression is that they see themselves as far removed from debates about copyright and I'm trying to steer them into considering how the issues directly affect them.

Oh, and I'm also bringing in the Austin Chronicle to show them that the event is being widely advertised!

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