sharing class notes
Sharing (or worse selling) class notes online is either ethically questionable or educationally destructive:
- If those notes are simply dictations of what is communicated by the teacher, then they are the property of the teacher and can not be shared or sold by the student without the teacher's consent.
- If those notes are a student's own synthesis of what is communicated by the teacher, then the student does harm to his peers by sharing the notes with them, for the following two reasons:
- His synthesis may contain wrong assumptions or deductions.
- Learning happens exactly when new material gets synthesised into the body of already known material. In other words, synthesis is the entire goal of education. This is a painful process that needs to be individually conducted. It is not a social exercise. Each student's past cognitive endowment is different and therefore each end result of synthesis will be different.
