I gave a paper at Osgoode Professional Development (OPD) yesterday, on ‘Multimedia learning: 2002-18: A case study across a century of digital learning’ – slides beneath the Slides tab above.[1] Our focus in the workshop was the design of a set of multimedia resources in 2002/4 at the Glasgow Graduate School of Law (GGSL), and its use with several hundred adjunct staff and around 3,000 students in the period 2002-18 on a professional education programme at the GGSL, and later at Strathclyde University Law School. The resources were created over a 10-month period, and were used in a two-week Foundation Course in Legal Skills within the programme.[2] Detailed feedback was obtained from students in an early study and which was shown in the session. I drew general conclusions about design of legal skills multimedia resources, their use with students, and how some of the research on instructional technology could be used to evaluate the success of resource-based learning initiatives. We also discussed its use in future digital learning environments in legal education. Below the fold are some of the topics we discussed, and some further comment.
The multimedia resources were designed to be part of a Foundation Course in Professional Legal Skills, on the Diploma in Legal Practice, where we focused on specifically professional skills – interviewing, legal writing, drafting, negotiation, advocacy, precognition-taking (in Scots law, interviewing and taking the statements of witnesses) and professional legal research. The Course was built around a series of cycles of tell-show-do-review through each of the skills, with threaded narratives, themes, and a core set of ideas based upon communication, problem-based learning and ethics as the underlying chassis to the Course.[3] In their feedback on the first year of the Course students loved the practical focus, but said the show element was lacking. So we followed up with the multimedia designed to do just that.
I think that I first presented on the multimedia in 2005 or so at UKCLE, and was planning to expand the resources; but in the Glasgow Graduate School of Law’s Learning Technologies Development we poured our resources into other projects that needed built: the development of webcast environments, learning theory, regulation, ethics and professionalism. Behind that, too, was a sense that the multimedia worked – as long as the Course remained broadly the same, and the multimedia performed its designed role – so why change it?
The issue raises lots of interesting questions about the lifecycles of educational media, their costs, the content that we develop on them and the whole sustainability of what we do with digital learning and teaching on the web. Take costs for example – on one rough estimate the multimedia cost around 30-40,000 GBP to produce. Given that students used it for around 6-8 hours during the two-week Course, it’s maybe understandable that our Finance Officer’s eyes widened at the development costs – for around six hours self-learning, in a 28 week Diploma…. But put that into context: the multimedia was in use over a period of 14 years, saving tutor and many other costs. By my rough reckoning over that period – and the details are in the slides – it saved Strathclyde University something in the region of 100,000 GBP, and enriched student learning. Students also used the multimedia occasionally throughout the rest of the Diploma, particularly before assessments of skills, eg advocacy.
So – why would I want to change it? Because the design needed to be more accessible – that definitely needed changed (I believe it was made more accessible later; but my initial designs might have accommodated this better). Because things move on: there was no mobile version in 2004 because the very few mobile devices that were then available couldn’t run the application. Because the resources were Web 1.0 in a number of crucial respects.[4] In those early narrowband days we issued the resources on CD to students, and hosted them locally on computers in the GGSL. Because it was difficult to unpick the whole set of resources, to develop them for different audiences. For example our students proceeded from the Diploma into two-year traineeships with legal service employers – it would have been useful to have developed trainee-specific resources that built upon the Diploma multimedia resources; and to have done the same for newly-qualified lawyers. And at every stage to have given students direct access to the visual, auditory, textual components of the multimedia, so that they could pull them apart, put them together again like kindergarten building blocks, add their own multimedia, their own authorship: rip, mix, share. Archive the results, personalise it all, carry it with them into their careers.
One of the participants asked what I’d do if I were building anew today. That’s what I would want to do, and how much more liberating it would be for learners if they could be more actively involved in personalising the software. It’s surely the future of all such learning resources. Thus – and to adopt the predictions of my co-editor & co-author Sara de Freitas I quoted in the presentation – in the future there will be ‘student developed pedagogies’, ‘seamless lifelong learning’, ‘AI scaffolded learning’. Some of these are present in various forms in our 2011 book on Digital Games and Learning and our book series. I’ve written about how things are already changing – eg the development of exo-cortices.[5] Towards the end and in a single slide I brought together one version of future digital functions – curriculum design, whole-life portals (not just ePortfolios), discipline-based LMSs for legal learners of all stages, and sim engines (slide 37). Multimedia, multimodal learning would be deeply embedded into all of these technologies. Actually, in one form or another some of them have been around for decades, centuries, if we know where to look for them – in the work of Pestalozzi, Montessori, Dewey, the progressive school movement in England in the 1960s and 70s.
One final point. The century mentioned in the title refers to the idle notion that one human year = seven internet years, in other versions 12, maybe 20. On one level it’s an attempt to say how fast stuff happens on the web, and how fast the web itself changes. But it’s silly of course: our experience of time is highly contextual, much more sophisticated than that. When you’re waiting for a page to load on a slow connection 30 seconds might seem like several minutes. And a fast connection is no use at all if you’re not ready to create, or the quality of your attention is poor, scratchy. But there is a point to it apart from catching your eye, which is the profound variation in perceived time and attention that the internet has introduced to our cultures.
All major shifts in technology shift time. An oral poem such as the Iliad was originally, exists in specific time, that of the reciter/poet, and the time periods spent in listening, which of course affects attention and memory. Later, if Plato’s Socrates mistrusted writing as a technology because in his view it harmed memory, it did so in part because it shifted time and attention in major ways from the habits of oral and mnemonic cultures. Later still, if Erasmus and Dürer were fascinated by the new technology of moveable print and could foresee its power for scholarly communications and the creation and dissemination of art, they also observed how the new speed of communications and art was shifting information, viewpoint, perspective in historical events even further beyond the agency of players. Time haunts Adam Ferguson’s discourses on civil society, that hold in some kind of momentarily coherent tension a classical Stoic discourse rooted in wholly different time cultures with the terrible modernity of eighteenth century Scotland, only decades away from industrialised, standardised time.
And so it is with us. Csikszentmihalyi’s flow of learning and attention within time is an observation of how one type of learning can be deepened in the digital age; Mitch Resnick’s book Lifelong Kindergarten, summarising a lifetime’s work spent on creativity, problem-solving and learning, is a remarkable plea for us to treat learning as forms of serious play, and to give time to it. That’s a key role for future multimedia in legal learning.
- [1]My thanks to OPD staff, especially Yu Tin and Oliver, for helping with the organisation of the session.↩
- [2]The first iteration of the resources was in 2002, and the environment was revised in 2004 by David Sams and others in the Learning Technologies Development Unit of the GGSL. Their technical work was outstanding.↩
- [3]This was later informed a draft of the professional skills outcomes for the Law Society of Scotland↩
- [4]The first iteration, back in 2002, was in Cold Fusion, if I remember rightly. The second was coded in Macromedia Director, in 2004, and remained in that media to this day.↩
- [5]In the Editorial to the special edition of the Law Teacher.↩