Am doing a brief slot for the Association of Law Teachers (ALT) Legal Education Research Network (LERN) today on social media and research, in a workshop designed to explore, in the words of Patricia Leighton, the ‘various ways that we can make people aware of our research and its findings, moving beyond the “traditional methods” of conference papers and articles in learned journals’. Actually I’m going to swerve around the term social media, and my piece is now ‘New media and digital research literacies’. There are fundamental issues in how the digital is altering almost every aspect of our intellectual lives, and we so seldom give ourselves the time to pause, read the research, enter the critical and contested debates, think about the practical implications of it all and then — most pressing — act on it. Putting together the slides (usual place, under Slides tab above and on Slideshare) it was clear to me, yet again, how implicated, entangled the issues are, how much clarity we need to bring to the task of thinking through what we do, how careful we need to be about our assumptions, our models, and our conclusions; and how we’re going to create and organise the future for our research practices. Some of the things I’ll be discussing — digital literacies, open practices, emergent digital research practices, how digital is transforming conventional research practices, digital as socio-material cultural practice, situated research in a global context. In 20 minutes. There’s an entire conference series to be held on this alone.
LERN: digital media and legal education research
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