It was billed in the conference programme as the launch of the BILETA online teaching policy. But the document is more subtle and radical than this: a BILETA manifesto; not teaching-focused but learning-centred; not just online but education in the round.
Why a manifesto, why now? There was a feeling that post-pandemic, with the drift back to f2f classes (aka go-backery, or Donald Schon’s ‘dynamic conservatism’), we needed a statement of what we had learned, where we were going with edtech. And so four academics associated with BILETA were commissioned to write a statement, which they rightly framed as a manifesto – Edoardo Celeste, Rossana Ducato, Thorsten Lauterbach and the late Hiroko Onishi.
The manifesto starts by outlining situation since COVID-19. Section 1 consists of key priorities and recommendations for the post-pandemic HEI, including the challenges and risks for education wrought by digital technologies. Following that are recommendations, dealing with impacts on fundamental rights and access to education, mental and social well-being of students and staff when working online, pedagogical and organisational challenges, and the changing contexts of assessment design. A second section then turns to deal with what the authors term an ’emergency education plan’, to deal with the lack of contingency planning that was so evident during the pandemic. In this regard, the manifesto concludes, best practices could be shared between HEIs, ‘with BILETA as a facilitator’.
The manifesto had already been circulated to the BILETA community for comment. At the conference, Thorsten and Rossana presented its content briefly, and as a BILETA Hon VP with an interest in legal education I was invited to comment upon the document. Below is a slightly fuller version of what I said.
I began by noting that BILETA always had a remit for legal education from its inception in 1986. The three BILETA Reports on legal education and technology (1991, 1996 and 2004) were early evidence of this. They were based broadly upon information gathered from law schools on how digital technologies were being used, and were useful in mapping the field, and giving law schools a tool to compare their work with that of others.
There was little in any of the reports on the application of educational theory, the construction of new theory, or forms of regulation. These issues were addressed to some degree in the ACLEC report (1996) and its associated papers (on educational standards and regulation of standards) – but ACLEC didn’t address integration of tech and conventional legal education. Other regulatory reports in England & Wales in this period (Ormrod, Benson, Marr, Wood) barely acknowledged the idea of legal edtech, let alone explored it.1
The Legal Education & Training Review (LETR) was the first report to comment extensively on legal edtech in E+W. It took an approach one term for which might be ‘resistant reading’, used by critics of imaginative literatures and of literacy (eg Gunther Kress).2 It argued for:
- technology to be implicit in all forms of academic and professional legal learning
- integration of critical and professional forms of innovation
- a move beyond multi-modal regulatory steering mechanisms (eg advocated by Colin Scott) to development of a ‘shared space’ of regulatory discourse and collaborative action.
What we have in this 30 year span therefore are two shifts:
- from early forms of information/data gathering to exploration of educational models and discourses
- the rise of regulatory interest in technology in legal education
The shifts are not unrelated. The early reports revealed how pervasive digital edtech was becoming. In the early models of regulation of legal education, regulators followed input models – eg counting books in law libraries as an indicator of quality in learning – that were scarcely defensible as a form of educational regulation. The BILETA reports fed that tendency as regards edtech, alas (eg counting numbers of computers in labs); but they also gave power to law schools to demand more funding for technology, and to raise the profile of the edtech movements in the schools, both in practice and scholarly research. Latterly, regulators came to adopt various forms of outcomes-based regulation – which were defeasible, but still flawed.
These regulatory shifts were by no means limited to the jurisdictions of these isles – England, Wales, Ireland, N. Ireland and Scotland. We can see similar shifts occurring in Canada, Australia and the USA in different timescales. The ABA’s long rearguard action against the introduction of online education bar a tiny proportion of the accredited JD programme, for example, is one instance of a regulatory body adhering to a strong input model, unwilling to make the move to outcomes-based regulation; and driven by defensive concerns that digital & online education would open the floodgates to online Diploma mills.
Yet while this was ongoing, the innovations and experiments arising from law schools never ceased – the edtech contributions to BILETA’s annual conferences are evidence of that alone.3 To be sure, there were problems with much of this research on which I’ve commented elsewhere; but it’s clear that innovation and implementation continued in spite of regulatory indifference or hostility. What we lacked in the field of edtech, though, was leadership from scholarly bodies in these isles: leadership in the form of deeply-thought, historically-aware, inspirational, forward-looking manifestos that would be strong, clear statements for us to adopt, not just egs of what works. We needed a manifesto that interrogated the fundamental issues we face; a document, a space, that challenged both authority and amnesia.
There are plenty instances out there in other disciplines. See MedTech Europe’s Empowering Patients, Inspiring Innovation. MedTech Europe Manifesto for 2024-2029. Or take the Manifesto for Teaching Online, produced by Edinburgh University’s Centre for Research in Digital Education, which with its Wildean, epigrammatic statements provokes us into rethinking edtech creatively in many ways.
What sort of ways? Well take this example. Way back in the 1990s, Gary Neustadter critiqued the approach of the electronic casebook in legal education, arguing that it was constrained by the genre it attempted to escape from (the name of course represents the problem). For him, electronic casebooks merely mirrored ‘the organizational structure and content of the paper version’ and failed to transform the ‘fundamental nature of the materials’.4 His critique is a version of the argument that, in Gitelman’s terms, a delivery technology is enmeshed in the social practices of a medium, and transfers poorly to another medium.5
That’s one way of putting it. The Manifesto for Teaching Online puts it succinctly: ‘the best online courses are born digital’ – in other words, they are conceived as digital, and designed and produced for the environment in which they will be used. The research group contrast the situation where staff who attempt to transfer a face-to-face course to the online environment mimic online the campus-based course, accepting the embedded metaphors and structures that too easily are transferred, without serious educational thought given to the problems of transference from one medium to another6
I cite this example because we’re confronted with it massively with the appearance of AI in our midst, not so much deus ex machina as, apparently, deus in machina, if you drink the Kool-Aid. Here too, we are constrained by genre, by transference. We need creative, unconstrained thinking for legal education at a time when universities are offering superficial advice, or too hastily changing directions of teaching and assessment; and at a time, too, when the profession’s regulators are moving fast to issue guidance in the use of AI.7 A manifesto such as this one written by Edoardo, Rossana, Thorsten and Hiroko, commissioned and endorsed by BILETA, can bring about a creative change in focus while keeping the long view – for example by not separating technology and learning, by not embedding technology in learning, but by adopting fusion-thinking, where we take seriously the culturally-mediated approaches of media scholars such as Gitelman and many others.
At the panel session’s question time, Gavin Sutter asked the pertinent question – how are we going to achieve this with today’s educational regimes in our law schools? And his neighbour (whose name, alas, I missed) asked an equally valuable question – how can we achieve this when edtech in HE is controlled by around five big corporations? A manifesto is the start, I would say, but we need to develop it and work with it in two ways.
First, and most practically, BILETA must support its manifesto with action. We should be organising seminars, workshops, forming networks of academics interested in taking forward aspects of the manifesto. We could be building a web of good practices arising from it. And if the occasion merits it, we should be organising these responses in a book based on emerging theories and practices – much as the Online Teaching Manifesto resulted in this excellent collection of theory and practice. Individually and collectively we need to work with the manifesto. Above all, there needs to be an ongoing process of review. A manifesto is more than a snapshot but is not immutable: it needs to change according to contexts.
Second, a manifesto should challenge us on agency, power, and our capacity to forge and act upon resistant readings. This one certainly does. It asks us of legal education: do we make it happen, or do we let it happen? Where do we stand in regards to that – do we take responsibility for bringing-forth education, or do we just allow technology to control us? Heidegger’s famous linkage of techne/poesis expressed so long ago, is still germane:
techne is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poietic.8
Arrange it this way for clarity:
Techne :: Poiesis
Learning :: Technology
The print-block expresses the bridge or zeugma between techne and poiesis, learning and technology; the chiasmus between techne & technology (by no means the same thing) and poiesis & learning; and looking at it vertically, the fusion of techne & learning, and poiesis & technology. It helps to redefine relationships, to redress them. That redress, return to deep thinking, is essential if we are to bring about change.
That notion of redress is central to a manifesto. It was explored in detail by a poet after whom the lecture theatre of DCU was named – Seamus Heaney. Amongst his many other honours he was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1989-94), and the lectures that he gave during his tenure of the post he later published in a book entitled The Redress of Poetry, a manifesto of sorts. He begins by outlining the problem as he saw it:
Professors of poetry, apologists for it, practitioners of it, from Sir Philip Sydney to Wallace Stevens, all sooner or later are tempted to show how poetry’s existence as a form of art relates to our existence as citizens of society – how it is “of present use.” 9
As a result, Heaney claims,
[Poetry’s] power as a mode of redress […] – as agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices – is being appealed to constantly. But in discharging this function, poets are in danger of slighting another imperative, namely to redress poetry as poetry, to set it up as its own category, an eminence established and a presssure established by distinctly linguistic means. (5-6)
Heaney notes the OED’s four entries for ‘redress’, including ‘”To set (a person or a thing) upright again; to raise again to an erect position. Also fig. to set up again, restore, re-establish”’ (15). And he claims more for poetry’s domain:
I want to profess the surprise of poetry as well as its reliability; I want to celebrate its given, unforeseeable thereness, the way it enters our field of vision and animates our physical and intelligent being. (15)
The affirmation of this phenomenological nature of the encounter with poetry also finds its source in another meaning of redress:
[This] reminds me of a further (obsolete) meaning of ‘redress’, with which I would conclude […]: “Hunting. To bring back (the hounds or deer) to the proper course.” In this “redress” there is no hint of ethical obligation; it is more a matter of finding a course for the breakaway of innate capacity, a course where something unhindered, yet directed, can sweep ahead into its full potential. (15)
In reading these quotes, replace the idea of ‘poetry’ with that of ‘legal education’. The fit is remarkable; and we reveal aspects of the experience of legal education that need redress, never more so than in our contemporary managerialist institutions: education as freedom, as transformative power, as individual and collective creative capacity. The BILETA manifesto can contribute to that. I leave the last words to Heaney, a poet with a unique concern for identity, borders and their redress, for they seem to sum up much of what the BILETA manifesto is saying to us:
I [want] to affirm that within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic; to affirm also that each form of knowledge redresses the other and that the frontier between them is there for the crossing. (213)
- There is a similar absence in the regulatory literatures in Ireland and N. Ireland in this period. The Law Society of Ireland has since published reports, research and other documents that reveal its innovations in edtech, and its plans for the future. See eg Rory O’Boyle’s presentation in the BILETA conference the day before. ↩︎
- See Kress, G. (2003) Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge ↩︎
- For a summary review of the literature on simulation in legal education 19723-2012, see Maharg, P., Nicol, E. (2014). Simulation and technology in legal education: a systematic review and future research programme. In Grimes, R., Phillips, E., Strevens, C. (eds), Legal Education: Simulation in Theory and Practice, London, Routledge, Emerging Legal Education series, 17-42. ↩︎
- Neustadter 1998, cited Ashley 2000, 278. See Neustadter, G. (1998). Rethinking electronic casebooks. Lessons from the Web. Retrieved from http://jurist. law. pitt. edu/lesjun98. htm. See Ashley, K. D. (1999). Designing electronic casebooks that talk back: The CATO program. Jurimetrics, 40, 275 ↩︎
- See her comprehensive definition of media:
‘I define media as socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation.’
Gitelman, L. (2006). Always Already New. Media, History and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MASS, The MIT Press, 7. ↩︎ - See Ross J., Collier A. (2016). Complexity, mess and not-yetness: Teaching online with emerging technologies. In Veletsianos G., Emergence and Innovation in Digital Learning: Foundations and Applications. Athabasca University Press, Issues in Distance Learning, 17-33. ↩︎
- See for instance:
The Law Society of British Columbia: Guidance on Professional Responsibility and Generative AI (November 2023), https://www.lawsociety.bc.ca/Website/media/Shared/docs/practice/resources/Professional-responsibility-and-AI.pdf
The Law Society of Alberta: Generative AI Playbook (January 2024), https://www.lawsociety.ab.ca/resource-centre/key-resources/professional-conduct/the-generative-ai-playbook/
The Law Society of Saskatchewan: Guidelines for the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in the Practice of Law (February 2024): https://www.lawsociety.sk.ca/wp-content/uploads/Law-Society-of-Saskatchewan-Generative-Artificial-Intelligence-Guidelines.pdf
Courtesy of Amy Salyzyn, CALE-ACEJ listserv. More on AI in a later post on this blog. ↩︎ - Heidegger, M. (1978). The question concerning technology. In D.F. Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 290 ↩︎
- (1995), London, Faber, 7. ↩︎