Category: educational critique

  • Teaching ≈ Learning ≈ Regulation

    At the behest of Dr Paulina Wilson of QUB I recently wrote a short piece for the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly series called Reflections on Teaching. Around 5,000 words. Usually it takes me 5K to draw breath, so it was quite a challenge to reflect on 44 years in education, 34 of them in legal…

  • Mergers & collaborations

    Mergers & collaborations are in the air, again.  A while back City St George’s president Anthony Finkelstein, aka prof serious, recommended consolidating providers to improve the HE sector’s finances.  The merger of the universities of Kent and Greenwich into the London & South East Group has been approved by the Dept for Education.  They’re one…

  • Panel session: The Role of AI and Legal Education, Westminster U Law School

    A couple of weeks ago I spoke on a panel session at a one-day conference organised by Westminster U Law School – The Role of AI and legal education: Preparing the Next Generation of Lawyers.  I was on annual leave at the time, in Florence, so attended only the panel not the whole conference, but…

  • Happy anniversary, blog

    Since I seem to be thinking about things past more than present or future at the moment, before this year’s end I want to mark the 20th anniversary of my blog.  I started in 2005, around January, I think, on Blogger.  Felt uneasy with the platform though, so quickly moved to Typepad, which was then…

  • My first experience of digital education

    After I finished my Arts doctoral thesis and Education qualifications, and before I turned to Law, I worked as a part-time tutor in the Eng Lit dept at Glasgow University.  I kept in touch with my medieval tutor, Des O’Brien, who was an extraordinary polymath.  In 1987 he obtained a grant from the Computers in…

  • One-time perpetual purchases – the very idea

    There is no end to the ways that publishers monetize digital access to knowledge for the good of, well, publishers.  Latest in a long line is Clarivate Plc, who recently unveiled a ‘transformative subscription-based access strategy for academia’.  They claim that the approach ‘enables broad, simple and affordable access to trusted scholarly content for learning…

  • BILETA 2024: Legal education manifesto

    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…

  • BILETA 2024

    I’m at the two-day BILETA 2024 annual conference, held this year in Dublin, hosted by Dublin City University’s School of Law and Government. As an Honorary Vice President of BILETA I was invited by the Executive to participate in a roundtable on the newly-minted policy document, ‘A manifesto for the post-pandemic university’. The document describes…

  • Redivivus

    To all three of my readers, apologies for my disappearance over the past year and more. Many things intervened, including job changes, illness, house moves ending up here on the Isle of Skye; the acquisition of a giant collie and a motorbike (more of which anon), the renewal of old acquaintances, Hannah Arendt, Adam Ferguson…