Senior Teaching Fellow
Law School
Bowland North
Lancaster University
LA1 4YN
Tel: Lancaster 592458
Email: s.bloxham@lancaster.ac.uk
Sefton enrolled at Lancaster, as a mature student, for an LLB, 1980-83. Prior to enrolling as a law student he’d spent ten years in a variety of jobs, inter alia, silk screen printer, hospital porter, youth worker, lorry driver and plumber. After full-time lecturing at Lancaster 1983-1987 he moved to a half-time Teaching Fellowship until 1997 while taking primary responsibility for child care. From 1997 onwards, following a period of leave in the USA, he began to develop an interest in e-learning which complemented his general interest in contemporary thinking in the field of learning theory. In 2000 he took up a two-year part time secondment as a Learning, Teaching & Assessment Strategy Developer with the Higher Education Development Centre at Lancaster (0.3 FTE secondment), with responsibility for implementing programme specifications within the Social Science Faculty. During that period he was promoted to Senior Teaching Fellow in the Law School and took primary responsibility for departmental preparations for QAA. In 2002-2003, he spent a year on secondment with the UKCLE, acting as ICT Advisor. On completion of that appointment, he took up a second half-time post as Senior Lecturer at Edge Hill University with responsibility for teaching and learning on a new Qualifying Law Degree.
Since the mid 1990s he has presented numerous conference papers and published articles on learning and teaching issues in legal education, with a particular focus on e-learning. He has been involved with projects at Lancaster on the role of assessment, skills development, and the use of ICT in support of student-centred learning. He has participated in the work of the (former) CTI Law Technology Centre and was involved with the Law Courseware Consortium, "Implementing Iolis" Project from 1999-2001. He joined the Learning in Law Initiative (LILI) when it was formed in 1999 and, in 2000 became a member of ILTHE (now general practitioner of the HEA). Since 1999, he has facilitated numerous staff development workshops on behalf of the UKCLE, primarily focussed on e-learning. He was co-ordinator of the BILETA Survey of ICT use in Law Schools in 2003-2004 and is currently involved in a UKCLE/BILETA funded project on VLEs in Legal Education. He is also involved in a project at Edge Hill embedding Personal Development Planning within the law curriculum through the use of a VLE. In April 2006, he was elected Deputy Chair of BILETA.
When not in front of a computer screen his leisure interests include maintaining a large organic vegetable garden, listening to music (favourites being Miles Davis and Bob Dylan) and supporting Arsenal football club (or more specifically, Thierry Henry).