Raenette Taljaard's Profile

In 1915 John Dewey wrote in his "Constructivist Pedagogy" that effective learning occurs when...

• Student autonomy and initiative accepted and encouraged
  
  
• Teacher asks open-ended questions and allows wait time for responses
  
  
• Higher level thinking is encouraged
  
  
• Students engage in dialogue with teacher and each other
  
  
• Students engaged in experiences that challenge hypotheses
  
  
• Class uses raw data primary sources, physical and interactive materials
  
  
• Knowledge and ideas emerge only from a situation in which learners have to draw them out of experiences that have meaning and importance to them

Content in Today's Society

It's not just bloggers whose content is being used, shared, and profited from today - perhaps now bloggers can begin to appreciate what other industries, like the recording industry or the movie-making industry, has had to face in this new digital age.

How did it come to this? Jonathan Handel, a digital media, entertainment and technology lawyer posts on his blog about the nature of content in today's society.

He sees six reasons for content's devaluation (to paraphrase):

1. Supply and Demand: The supply of online content has grown enormously in the past decade, including user-generated content, a bunch of which includes content created by people who don't care if they get paid for its creation.
2. Loss of Physical Form: When you steal an object (like a DVD, for example), you deny it to the owner. When you "steal" a movie, by downloading it, it's still there for others to use. Its intangible nature makes its appropriate feel much less like stealing.
3. It's Easy: Getting content from the internet is far easier than through traditional methods.
4. New Media is Ad-Supported: The "freemium" model makes content available at no cost to the user - so why should the user see the content as valuable?
5. Market Forces: Computers and web services are more valuable when more content is available, and non-professionals flock to use the new technologies of the web, as they had long been denied access to distribution via traditional methods.
6. Culture: A generation of users has grown up indifferent or even hostile to copyright.