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At Fiona Cownie's invitation I gave a paper at the Oñati Workshop on Values in Legal Education, 23-24 April.  First day, first session was my paper: '"Associated thought"': social software, professional relationships and democratic professionalism'.  Slides here, draft paper here.  Discussion on the issues of technocratic vs democratic professionalism was fairly extended.  

Cartoon courtesy of toothpastefordinner.com. It's been a l-o-n-g time but [terminator voice] I'm back.  No excuses, just life & writing got in the way of blogging.

Some very good sessions – of the ones I went to, Paul Catley's work on MCQs and their effect on student learning deserves a mention. Follow his work if you're interested in the use of quizzes, etc. Caroline Maughan's session with Jonathan Tecks on simulation, though I didn't attend it, looked excellent from the paper they produced.…

Am blogging (not quite live — not enough laptops for the presenters so mine had to be borrowed) the ALT conference organised by Hugo de Rijke here at the Tropenmuseum.  Hugo has recently re-organized the ALT web site, which is now hugely improved, and will be a real resource for law academics in the UK…

Great session by Paulo Lopes on Managing Inerpersonal situations' — so interactive that I cdn't live-blog it, so utterly engaging it was.  Learned a lot re facilitation from this. Presented SIMPLE, and felt once again, as after ANU, that a quick canter around the theory and practice is just not useful any more.  But perceptive…

Next up, Michael Eraut in a plenary session.  I've followed Michael's work for years, and it's had a major influence on what we've done at the GGSL.  He began with theory, looking for instance at interactions between time, mode of cognition and type of process.  For example, contrast of type of process, instant reflex, and the…

At the Learning to be Professional conference at the University of Surrey.  No web connection for the first day, which was a pity since I'd like to have blogged the interesting presentations — see conference wiki here.  I was invited by Norman Jackson to present on our work at GGSL (draft paper & slides up…

Melissa Hardee started out by defining professionalism, then asking if we can teach professionalism.  She took a variety of definitions, coming down on a general definition of professionalism as being more than the sum of rules and regulation, and more than a matter of behaviour.

Every year professional legal educators from the smaller jurisdictions in these isles get together for an annual conference – small-scale, but valuable, because the scale of small jurisdictions creates its own opportunities and its own problems.  This year we're hosting the conference in GGSL, University of Strathclyde Law School.  The theme is professionalism, and I'm…

UKCLE is leading a bid for funding from HEFCE, through JISC, to development OER for the law subject centre. Partnering with Strathclyde University, and in particular with our law school and Management Science, in addition to the law schools of the Universities of Glamorgan and Warwick, the bid focuses on the development of resources for simulation in…

Michael Hughes and I were invited to the Legal Workshop, at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra.  Over the course of a week at the start of March we worked with academic staff, educationalists and IT staff to produce a series of pilot simulations on their Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice.  We gave numerous presentations…

In case you missed it when it first came out last year in the Law Library Journal, the second edition of Pearl Goldman's excellent annotated bibliography is now available on SSRN — invaluable for anyone interested in the impact of technology on legal education.