New Practices and Best Practices

The Pedagogy of Place
How to Tell Whether Writing Instruction Works
Fair Use and Student-Created Video

The Pedagogy of Place

Teach students about the local spaces where they work and live - their history, sociology, and their treatment of literary texts -- and uses cities and their cultural institutions as learning laboratories.

How to Tell Whether Writing Instruction Works

The ability to write effectively has become more important than ever. In the communication and information age, even fields that required little writing in the past now demand facility and precision in written expression.

What writing competencies do we want college students to learn? To create a grammatical sentence? To craft a logical paragraph? To write for different audiences and disciplines? In a period when accountability has become a buzzword, how can we tell whether our methods for writing instruction work?

Fair Use and Student-Created Video

When college kids make mashups of Hollywood movies, are they violating the law? Not necessarily, according to the latest study on copyright and creativity from the Center and American University's Washington College of Law.

The study, Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video, by Center director Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, co-director of the law school's Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, shows that many uses of copyrighted material in today's online videos are eligible for fair use consideration. The study points to a wide variety of practices-satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups)-all of which could be legal in some circumstances.