Once again we delve into the murky waters of copyright and integrating other peoples ideas into our classroom teaching, an area I have always struggled with, see my earlier blog Easier to keep your head in the sand for some thoughts on this. Remix culture to me is teaching, we are constantly taking ideas from others and changing them to suit our subjects, our teaching methods and our students. It is a big part of what we do already.
My favorite all time remix- The Grey Album, by Danger Mouse this CD mixed Jay-Zs Black Album vocals with samples from the Beetles White Album, genius. For the record both Jay-Z and McCartney were fine with the project, EMI no so. Ironically I was going to use the album cover to support this blog post, instead I found it was copy written.
Lawrence Lessig (who after some simple internet search’s turns out to be the remix guru) blog post The “Imbecile” and “Moron” Responds discusses the “fair use” concept within copyright law, the definition still seems vague to me, I get the impression there is a fair bit of grey area around the subject and hence the large numbers of conflicting views. In Lawrence’s opinion the “fair use” argument is perfectly acceptable for the use of other peoples material, provided the person taking the material uses “it in the context of remix creativity, consistent with the requirements of remix creativity, meaning consistent with the requirement that the use be fair use.” I doubt many traditional recording artists, writers and more importantly record companies and publishing houses would agree with his premise on this.
My Modern World History classes are studying a unit on Imperialism throughout the 19th and 20th century. Normally I show clips from the Gandhi film (the whole movie is on youtube if you have a spare 3 hours) to show examples of passive resistance and some of Gandhi’s speech’s, however after reading some of the strategies outlined in Remixing as a Classroom Strategy I had the idea that it would be good to clip up the sections I normally show (using i- Movie) and remove the soundtrack. Students in groups would then be required to provide their own voice-overs, either as a speech or a simple explanation of what is happening in the clip. This way the students would be required to infer which aspect of the decolonization process the film is showing. If they miss the point of the original clip? Who cares, as long as what they are saying can be supported by evidence and fits in to context then the task will be meaningful. Much the same as the ideas put forward by Josh Karp in Remixing as a Classroom Strategy where he quotes another classroom teacher saying “with remixing, students and writers can take that story line as a jumping off point to jumble the characters, ideas and other components of a romance. “It’s what you do with it,” Johnson says. “That’s what becomes genius.”
