Intellectual Property Lesson Plan Reflection

This lesson was intended to provide an introduction to intellectual

property, provide my students with a medium to use intellectual
property and a resource for easy access to it. One of the Learner
Outcomes for my department in my Listening/Speaking class is for the
students to create presentations. When they create their
presentations, my students just take whatever media they want from
the Internet and insert it in their slides. Part of the problem is that
there is a cultural misconception that this is an acceptable practice. I
chose the presentation web site emaze to introduce the idea that we
need to use media that is respectful of other peoples intellectual
property. The lesson started off with an introduction to intellectual
property and the cultural differences between how this idea is
understood in the U.S. higher education compared to what they are
already familiar with from their culture of origin. We then go through a
video tutorial on how to use emaze. The students then create a
presentation and use the Creative Commons search tool to insert
media into their presentation. At the end they are given a couple of
reflective questions that allow them to summarize their activities and
thoughts about the lesson.
The students are learning how the American higher education
system uses intellectual property (audio, video and photos) that is
often used in presentations. Anything written is covered in Writing
class, and we have so much content to cover, I dont want to make this
a comprehensive lesson. I do want them to learn that its not
acceptable by American standards to take things from the Internet and
use them as their own, and I want to give them some simple tools to
be able to use media in their presentations correctly and easily. The
major underlying assumption within the lesson is that knowledge is
cultural and not universal.
The affordances in emaze are that listening to a presentation
requires low cognitive functioning, so that the students can focus on
the very new and challenging ideas that are being presented. The
constraints are mainly that presentations are not inherently interactive,
so that area will take some extra thought. (As Ive been thinking about
this problem, Ive decided to require them to create a presentation with
a partner as the essential interactive part of the lesson.)
Learning will ultimately take place within the negotiation with
their partners of connecting the ideas introduced in the presentation to
the execution of media taken from the public domain. Since I am
creating a lesson that uses a partner it will involve social
constructivism, but thats not inherent in emaze. I think the
construction of the presentation will involve behaviorism. If they click
the wrong button they will have to continue until the get positive
feedback which will be a new slide, for example.

The main role that technology plays is the ability for students to
have a visual representation of the ideas being conveyed and the
ability to use that knowledge in practice. The main disadvantage is
that, again, there is not a lot of inherent interaction among the
students. Because the lesson is about how to appropriately use photos
and audio, in a presentation, its useful to use the same type of tool to
construct the lesson.
One of our Learner Outcomes is for students to create
presentations. So teaching them the proper way to use other peoples
intellectual property, i.e. photos and audio, is supplemental to that
outcome. One of the goals of our ESL department is, not just to prepare
students linguistically but academically as well, so understanding
intellectual property is essential to that preparation.
There are some parts of Web 2.0 present in emaze because there
are social aspects of the site. Users can create a profile, vote on
different presentations and its stored in the cloud, so it can be
accessed anywhere. You can also share your presentations to social
media sites or through email, etc. I dont think its distracting because
its not necessary to use these tools; its by choice only.
The biggest difference that Im going to address is the cultural
background of the students as well as the language level of the
students that Im teaching to. I will address cultural differences with
artifacts from the Internet in the presentation, and adjust the language
for an intermediate class. I will also include some of the colleges
religious values as part of the lesson.
Its helpful for an instructor to have a background understanding
of how other cultures use intellectual property. In Asian cultures its
often considered a sign of respect to use other peoples work, so
knowing this gives a background for the lesson. Creating a
presentation is intentionally easy on emaze because of the templates.
Some basic understanding of how to create a presentation would be
helpful, but an introduction might be needed as well. Students simply
have to choose a template, add slides and insert content. If students
are not familiar with constructing a presentation, this will give them an
introduction to that later requirement as well. I will construct the lesson
such that they will concentrate on using the site and choosing
appropriate media, not creating the perfect presentation, by providing
them with the text.
After having created the lesson and thought about how it fits
with larger course goals, I piloted the lesson. My student for the pilot
was my mother oy vey. The positive side of this student was that
she has much in common with my actual students in their low-level
technology skills as well as their need for more direction rather than
independence. And although it was stressful, she was a real sport.
Overall it went well, however there were some serious problems that
needed to be addressed. The biggest take-away was that there is too

much going on in this lesson. Understanding intellectual property,

learning a new presentation tool and then using creative commons is
just too much in one lesson, as I have it structured. I do think if I had
started with creating the presentation and following it with discussing
intellectual property -- when it came time to use it -- the flow would
have been much more organic and likely easier to understand. I also
should give more directions, or a suggestion to take notes, rather then
just a video for the emaze presentation creation.
I wanted to try a new tool for this assignment, and the
misconception I was working with was about presentations, so it made
sense that I would use emaze to facilitate this. But now that I think
about this, there are so many other ways to go about it, and Im not
sure I went in the best direction. The obvious advantage is that emaze
is directly related to the misconception of the use of presentations, so I
would be using the same technology. The disadvantage is that it might
be over complicating the lesson needlessly. One of the reasons that I
used it was because of its ease of use. Im unsure if that is enough of a
reason to use it though.
I really wanted emaze to be a platform for the larger lesson, but I
think something that might be better would have been to focus on
Creative Commons rather than the other way around. My student did
ok with the technology. She was more patient and just worked her way
through it. One big question that she did ask was about the different
types of protections. I knew this might come up, but my goal was to
create a resource for media that can be freely used rather than a
comprehensive lesson on intellectual property, which is what I said. I
dont know if this is a good enough answer though. I feel like there
might be a better way to address this, but Im unsure of what it might
be. There were other smaller questions that were easy to answer like
the meaning of the word slide, which I described as different pages in a
presentation.
I got the indication that my student understood the obvious
connection between media and emaze because we all use pictures in
presentations. I think she also got an introduction to the idea that just
because its on the Internet doesnt mean we can take it and use it
however we like. Although, one thing interesting she said was, There
should be clear and simple guidelines. I wish there were as well. We,
as a global society, have yet to figure this out. She also said, Whoever
puts their media on the Internet, its their responsibility to protect it.
This idea was extraneous to the already complicated lesson, but it
shows how little most of us understand about the complexities of
intellectual property. This just reinforces my belief that I chose an
appropriate topic.