Spartan Daily, September 17, 1980

Volume 75, Issue 12https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/6648/thumbnail.jp

Will Fair Use Survive? Free Expression in the Age of Copyright Control

"Fair use" is a crucial exception to "intellectual property" controls - it allows users to publish, distribute, or reproduce copyrighted or trademarked material without permission, for certain purposes. But extensive research, including statistical analysis and scores of firsthand stories from artists, writers, bloggers, and others, shows that many producers of creative works are wary of claiming fair use for fear of getting sued. The result is a serious chilling effect on creative expression and democratic discussion.Several factors must be considered in deciding whether a use of copyrighted material is "fair." Four factors identified in the copyright law are: 1) the purpose and character of the new work; 2) the nature of the original work; 3) the amount and substantiality of the original work that was used; and 4) the effect of the new work on the market for the original. Examples of fair use are criticism, commentary, news reporting, scholarship, and "multiple copies for classroom use." "Will Fair Use Survive?" suggests the need for strengthening fair use so that it can be an effective tool for anyone who contributes to culture and democratic discourse. The report finds: Artists, writers, historians, and filmmakers are burdened by a "clearance culture" that ignores fair use and forces them to seek permission (which may be denied) and pay high license fees in order to use even small amounts of copyrighted or trademarked material.The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the DMCA) is being used by copyright owners to pressure Internet service providers to take down material from their servers on the mere assertion that it is infringing, with no legal judgment and no consideration of fair use.An analysis of 320 letters on the Chilling Effects website, an online repository of threatening cease and desist and "take down" letters, showed that nearly 50% of the letters had the potential to stifle protected speech. Report Highlights:The giant Bank of America sent a threatening letter to a small ceramic piggy bank company called Piggy Bank of America, claiming its use of the name was a trademark violation.A "planetary enlightenment" group called Avatar consistently suppressed online discussion group postings critical of its program by using DMCA "take down" letters.MassMutual sent a cease and desist letter to the gripe site "MassMutualSuks.com," claiming trademark infringement.Mattel sued artist Tom Forsythe for his series of "Food Chain Barbies," acerbic commentaries on Mattel's role in perpetuating gender inequality. Only after a long, bruising court fight did Forsythe win the right to parody Barbie.The report recommends: creating a clearinghouse for information, including sample replies to cease and desist and "take down" letters; outreach to Internet service providers who are instructed by companies to take down sites with material they claim as copyright-protected; changes in the law to reduce the penalty for guessing wrong about fair use; and the creation of a national pro bono legal support network.On December 15, 2005, Representatives Rick Boucher, Zoe Lofgren, and John Doolittle circulated a "Dear Colleague" letter praising the report for explaining why fair use "is a crucial part of our copyright law," and why legislation is needed to secure fair use rights in the digital environment

Spartan Daily, October 16, 1981

Volume 77, Issue 32https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/6808/thumbnail.jp

Excellence in English: what we can learn from 12 outstanding schools

"One of the most pressing issues in English facing a large number of schools today is how to improve from being good to outstanding. The aim of this report is to improve practice in English across all schools and particularly to help them become outstanding. The report provides 12 case studies of schools which are successful in helping their pupils to make outstanding progress in English." - Cover

A Critical Evaluation of the Thinking Frames Approach as a Teaching Strategy for Multidimensional Conceptual Change in the Science Classroom

This study investigated how a multi-dimensional conceptual change strategy, called the Thinking Frames Approach (TFA), supported students’ learning. The study was conducted in Grades 8-10 science classes over a two-year period. Results showed that students improved their conceptual understanding and written explanations in many science topics. Students’ interest and self-efficacy in science were also positively influenced. TFA support provided to the teacher in guiding students to go through multi-dimensional conceptual change is also discussed

Learning from Failure: An Action Research Case Study on Developing Growth Mindset Through Academic Risk-Taking in an Athletic Training Program

The employment of academic risk-taking and growth mindset instructional practices in educational fields, though supported in literature, is limited and not commonly documented in the classroom. The purpose of this action research case study was to determine the impact of facilitation of growth mindset through modification of instructional practices in athletic training clinical courses at an Institution of Higher Learning. Constructive failure and growth mindset theories supported the mixed-methods research approach and the modification of instructional practices made during the study. Data were collected through growth mindset and academic risk-taking instruments and through semi-structured survey questions. The data analysis was performed through thematic coding and descriptive statistics. The findings of this case study revealed that even small adjustments to instructional practices generated improvements in participant views of their abilities and responses to challenging situations. When participants were provided with immediate feedback during applied decision-making activities, they reported the feedback helpful and supportive in critical thinking. Allowing small choice in challenging situations provided ownership for the participants, which in turn resulted in the selection of challenging activities. Small classroom adjustments to allow for formative participation opportunities where accuracy was not the focus were successful at providing participants with supportive environments where learning was not feared, and knowledge was the primary objective. The researcher suggests applying the instructional methods utilized in the present research study, such as academic risk-taking activities through formative activities where the focus of the outcome is to increase learning rather than accuracy

Culture and Critical Thinking: Exploring Culturally Informed Reasoning Processes in a Lebanese University Using Think-Aloud Protocols

This study examined the role of cultural and contextual factors in the critical thinking processes of bilingual Lebanese undergraduate students. In addition, it investigated whether bilingual students used comparable processes to answer equivalent critical thinking questions in Arabic and English. A purposive sample of 24 upper division undergraduate students enrolled in a Lebanese university completed the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (CCTT) as well as 10 questions from the Sample Reasoning Mindset Test (SRMT). Participants were divided into two similar procedural groups. Group A completed the CCTT and SRMT in Arabic. Group B completed the assessments in English. A think-aloud protocol was used to collect verbal data of the thinking processes of the participants on select items from each test. Participant responses on the CCTT were coded using the consensus descriptions of the core critical thinking skills and sub-skills of interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, and self-regulation outlined in the APA Delphi Report (Facione, 1990a). Responses on the SRMT were coded based on whether statements were framed in moral terms, pragmatic terms, logical terms, religious terms, social/relational terms, or ideological terms. Additional patterns that emerged in the verbal data were labelled and utilized as appropriate. An exploratory quantitative analysis indicated no significant difference in overall scores based on demographic and linguistic variables. The mean and median scores on the CCTT were generally lower than scores from equally leveled participant scores in other studies. The results of the qualitative analysis of the verbal data demonstrated participant weaknesses in comparing options; considering multiple points of view; reasoning neutrally; engaging in global reasoning; identifying the credibility of sources; and the use of best-explanation criteria. The results also indicated that the majority of participants did not understand the concepts of equivocation; propositional logic; and the prope

What are the collocational exemplars of high-frequency English vocabulary? on identifying Mwus most representative of high-frequency, lemmatized concgrams

Collocations, simply defined, are words that have a high frequency of co-occurrence (Biber et al., 1999: Shin, 2006). Collocational fluency is an essential aspect of communicating in and comprehending a second language in a native-like fashion. However, second language learners of English struggle to obtain such fluency since there is a lack of focus on it in the classroom and in ESL resources. This stems from the lack of a large-scale resource that identifies which collocations to teach to help learners master high-frequency English. So, although a large number of researchers agree upon the importance of collocational fluency and focusing on high-frequency collocations directly, learners, teachers and materials writers lack guidance as to which items to focus on. Such a resource is not available because research that has consideration for all the important aspects of identifying collocations that previous researchers have identified has yet to be implemented on a large scale. Therefore, this thesis set out to accomplish such a task. The goal was to create a methodology which would result in a practical resource which identifies multi-word units most representative of high-frequency collocations of high-frequency lemma of English, and which of these items would be most useful for Japanese learners to study. It aimed to identify such items by collecting and analyzing corpus data with the help of eight native English speaking university teachers in Japan who teach English as a second language, two native English speaking junior high school teachers in Japan who teach English as a second language, five native Japanese translators with native-like ability in English, one native English speaking university professor who teaches English as a second language and has extensive knowledge developing concordance software, and one Romanian translator with native-like ability in both English and Japanese. Once identified, Japanese university freshmen were tested on their knowledge of these items. This study took a corpus linguistics approach, working with data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), to identify high-frequency collocations and the multiword units they most commonly occur in. A frequency cut-off was identified which resulted in approximately 11,000 multi-word units that only consist of approximately 3,000 word families, of which the vast majority are high-frequency. Corpus dispersion and chronological data were iii deemed unreliable for determining whether or not items selected had general usefulness over a variety of genres and throughout time, and time-consuming manual analysis for general usefulness was deemed essential. This was due to the fact that this study’s data analysis alone would either lead to items deemed worthy of direct instruction by native speakers being flagged as having unbalanced data dispersion at certain parameters, while at other parameters items deemed unworthy of direct instruction were shown to have balanced data dispersion. Also, consideration for colligation was found to only improve upon a small percentage of items, and while useful for improving the quality of data, the process was found to be extremely complex and time consuming due to the lack of an established methodology and dedicated software. Expanding multi-word units beyond their core was found to be an essential step in that native speakers opted to do this in over half of the items identified. For example, concordance data identified equal access as the most frequent multi-word unit that the two lemma equal/access occur in (the core unit), but the native speaker opted to add the next most common multi-word unit instead (equal access to) in regards to what unit should be studied directly by learners. Semantic transparency analysis to help select only items that are semantically opaque and thus deserve more study time was not fruitful since the majority of items identified were considered to be semantically transparent. In contrast, L1-L2 congruency was found to be a very important criterion to consider with half of the items identified being considered incongruent to an extent, thus deserving more study time. Furthermore, native speaker intuition was found to be extremely reliable in regards to context creation using mostly high-frequency vocabulary. Out of 130,000 tokens of example sentence context created, the added content only reduced the percentage of tokens in the high-frequency realm (3,000 word families) by 0.92 percent. Confirming this was essential in that if their intuition could be relied upon for context creation that used mostly high-frequency vocabulary it would help avoid adding additional learning burden. Finally, university students’ knowledge of a balanced selection of the items with consideration for frequency and L1-L2 congruency was found to be quite low overall, highlighting the need for increased focus on the list in general. This study thus filled a major gap in the research in that it resulted in a list of items which can be utilized to help create resources or studied directly to help improve collocational fluency. A variety of steps were taken to create this resource which helped highlight the value or lack iv thereof of each of these steps to achieve this study’s goal. Therefore, this study should be considered a valuable contribution towards research which aims to help second language learners achieve collocational fluency

Mathematics Exercise Generator: the language of parameterized exercises

Nowadays, the process of teaching and learning is changing from a traditional model in which teachers were the source of information for a model in which teachers appear as advisors who carefully observe students, assist in the selection of information by identifying their learning needs and support students in their autonomous study. In this chapter, the authors describe an approach used in curricular units of first year in Science and Engineer degrees, which results from a connection of three projects born in University of Aveiro: MEGUA, SIACUA and PmatE, and the interconnections of their informatics platforms. Although any scientific area besides mathematics can use this tool, the authors focus in a case study using an example on a specific topic of Calculus courses for first year students on Engineering: Sequences and Series of Functions. The methodology described allows teachers to achieve further goals on learning strategies and students to have enough material to practice.publishe