First, a word about the two sessions that weren’t recorded, namely the demo interview with Alexis Callen as lawyer and Dana Mohr as SC, and the panel: Alexis, Dana, Joan Rilling. Alexis did exceptionally well as a 1L lawyer, and Dana was first rate at enacting the client, and then switching into feedback mode with Alexis. Very good illustration of the power of the method in action. The panel was an opportunity for our participants to ask student and SCs about their experiences, which worked well.
And so to the wrap-up session, which was a lot more lively than I thought it might be. Workshop themes included: collaboration, funding, value of skills practice, learning to receive feedback, transition learning focus from knowledge to skills, desire for scaffolding skills learning, achieving buy-in to integrate skills learning as core component of law school, including opponents in skills program planning, adapting skills learning and rubrics for students with disabilities. (Thanks to Angela for this list.)
Where to from here. My agenda for the session included the following:
- The Simulated Client Initiative (SCI)?
- Lines of research?
- Publications?
- National and international dimensions?
But little of this was discussed – just as well perhaps – and instead, participants came out with interesting detailed questions and topics of their own arising from the day. Among them, Michelle Ryan asked a fascinating question – what about avatars as SCs? Wow. I answered saying that my interest was stimulated way back in Second Life, around 2006, but I left it aside for a number of reasons. Avatars were highly constrained representations of humans, and when an activity such as inteviewing is the focus of learning, voice, gesture, pose, etc are integral to the human comms of the event, and that digital representations simply couldn’t convey, or did so badly that it broke the flow of authenticity. Second, and as I’ve argued elsewhere, lawyers occupy not a multiverse, but a docuverse, and the focus of online multiverses such as SL on constrained representations of the real world had a model of interaction with the online world that distracted from learners’ interior mental models of law and interviewing and legal learning. Third, the costs of development were not trivial and I couldn’t be sure the end result would justify that.
But that was back in the day: who’s to say that AI, AR and machine learning can’t produce now or soon an avatar that will be useful in education. I wrote about this back in 2016 in the introduction to a tech special issue of The Law Teacher. And further back, in the Afterword to my book, Transforming Legal Education (2007), I drew up an imaginary of what a student’s assistant avatar might be like. Truth to tell, I’ve been fascinated in this since a child: doppelgangers, the dualities of identity, the representation of your self as other, the other as self and construction in the world – Alan Breck and David in Kidnapped, Jekyll and Hyde, Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, HAL in 2001, and more recently Ex Machina. In the workshop, though, I passed the question on to Delon and Lorena who gave us interesting futures for the idea from the near future of medical education.
Andy Unger asked a great question – why not get regulators such as the SRA to fund the development of SCs, maybe share their SCs that will be used on SQE? Why not indeed. If a regulator is to address the fundamental question of quality of legal education as part of their defence of the public interest, then instead of imposing top-down mandates on stakeholders, they would be better to work with educators, students and lawyers in CLE as partners, not stakeholders, in order to improve the quality of education and training. But there is a complicating factor in England and Wales regarding the the SRA’s latest ploy, the SQE, namely that the assessment will be handed over to a commercial outfit (Kaplan) to manage and run. Kaplan won the contract for QLTS – I worked with them at the start of that contract to develop their ideas around standards of assessment for SCs. But of course they didn’t reciprocate with others because their contract with SRA didn’t allow for that. And being a commercial concern they certainly weren’t going to share their in-house knowledge with the broader community of legal educators.
Which means that Andy’s question goes to the heart of the relationship between regulation and legal education. When commerciality is fish-sliced into that relationship, it changes everything and rarely for the better – I’ve long argued that position, and defended the concept of the wealth of networks, to paraphrase Yochai Benkler, who is of course riffing off that aspect of Adam Smith’s thought, and leaning in to the Adam Smith of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759 – yes you read that price right, and worth every penny). Which is why I was so delighted that in the final session there was momentum around the idea of an association of SC users who would pool resources, training and use of SCs in law schools in Canada. I dearly hope this comes about. It’s the only way in which we can disseminate widely the great advantages of the SC method, and reduce the costs of time and money. It’s the only way we legal educators can learn from each other: in Aristotelian terms, to be the scholars and researchers of our own praxis and poiēsis.
All presentations were recorded, and I’ll disseminate the link on this blog once the recordings are ready. Our feedback form was distributed and I’ll provide data once I have some. My grateful thanks to the contributors to the Workshop for making it a success, including our wonderful student interviewer Alexis and the SCs involved; to Victoria Watkins for her introduction to the day’s activities; to Lex from OPD for her super IT support, and to Angela Yenssen for co-organising and chairing the sessions. Finally my thanks to Osgoode for providing funds that enabled the workshop to take place.
This was my final working day at Osgoode Hall Law School, and I couldn’t imagine any better way of spending it; so a personal thanks to all concerned for helping me mark the occasion. An old techie groupie like me shouldn’t say it, but all that was missing was everyone round the table and a good single malt in the middle…