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Karen Barton, Michael Hughes and I are currently at Franklin Pierce Law Center,  in Concord, New Hampshire, working with John Garvey and others on SIMPLE projects.  The SIMulated Professional Learning Environment facilitates transactional learning between individual students or groups of students and staff, with students usually playing the role of practising lawyers.  SIMPLE can be used…

I've resigned from Strathclyde University Law School, effective as of 31 Jan 2010, and next day will be taking up a post as Professor of Legal Education at University of Northumbria Law School, and heading up a legal education centre there.  Retrospectives  will be posted in due course and nearer my departure.  But for the…

SIMPLE was awarded the prize for Innovation in e-Assessment at the JISC E-Assessment Scotland Conference held last week in Dundee.  The e-Assessment Competition attracted 28 entries from all over Scotland, including schools, further education colleges and universities. According to e-Assessment Scotland, the Innovation award highlights ‘an example of best practice in e-Assessment, which clearly demonstrates…

Colin Miller has posted a useful list of US law blogs on SSRN  – 2009 Legal Educator Blog Census, Version 1.0 – a list of ‘anyone who might be involved in the education of students at law schools in the United States’.  I scanned it for blogs dealing specifically with legal education.  Maybe I missed…

During visits abroad I like to get a sense of the place I’m in by early-morning jogging.  You see a city or campus anew, literally so.  The morning of the den Haag conference I headed out of the hotel along Jan Hendrikstraat, past the Grote Kerk, along Torenstraat, doubling back along streets quiet in the…

Earlier this month I was in the Netherlands, den Haag, at the Haagse Hogeschool, giving a workshop on SIMPLE at the wrap-up conference of the Cyberdam project.  I was invited by Diny Peters who, with Pieter van der Hijden, is one of the key movers in the project.  I call Cyberdam SIMPLE's sister project in the…

If the title of this post has an Enlightenment ring, it’s deliberate.  This second visit I came equipped with a modest knowledge of Japanese history, which is utterly fascinating; but it’s the social habitus that seizes you.  

In Schiphol airport waiting for the Glasgow flight, still thinking on the experience of the seminars.  A lot of what we talked about was grounded in Dewey’s educational pragmatism (more of Dewey & Japan in another post).  For Dewey, learning is a social process primarily.  As he points out in Experience and Nature, the achievement of social ends cannot be reduced to prior…

Vygotsky's notion of intellectual development was based on the idea of 'emergence or transformation of forms of mediation' (Wertsch, 1985, 15).  Certain intellectual tools, in other words (ie 'forms of mediation'), give rise to certain forms of thinking.  The remarkable thing about Vygotsky's formulation is how it liberates our thinking about culture, and particularly educational…

I missed the first panel session.  Later in the morning Gillian Calder from the University of Victoria, BC facilitated an excellent session where she showed us aspects of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed techniques, and his Tree of Theatre.  And she did so by getting us to do it – experiential learning.  

We re-convened for the final session of this project in the David Hume Tower, Edinburgh University (see here for posting on one of the early sessions last year).  Zen and Maks introduced the two-day conference, then their key papers were briefly summarized and commented upon by Julian Webb and Tony Bradney. Interesting comments on fine papers.  Wished there…