Category: Uncategorized

When I started as a postgrad student at Edinburgh University English Literature Dept way back in the late 1970s one of the many classes we didn't get and should have had, was on structuring our research projects. I remember at one group meeting being told by a lecturer about his rather complicated boxfile card index…

In Transforming Legal Education I describe what transactional learning is, its qualities and how it can be facilitated in legal curricula.  It derives from John Dewey's concept of learning as a transaction between self and the world, though the term has other connotations in the domain of professional learning.  There are other, constellated terms around this…

Fine keynote by Ian Ward (abstract, paper & slides at the link).  Thoughtful, provoking, and over a wide range of pedagogical issues. Two comments:

First session concerned negotiation.  Having arrived late (busy talking to others), I caught the idea that it was focused on negotiation practice and techniques as confidence building, and helping students to engage with each other on legal materials, and with those materials.  Helpful session that gave practical pointers to the session participants.  

Attended Lisa Cherkassky's (U. of Bradford)  session on variation in teaching, and how this affects students.  It's a critical issues, not least in team teaching.  In Scotland, the Diploma in Legal Practice is taught  by tutor-practitioners, and at GGSL we (Karen, Frances Murray, David Sillars and me) always need to compromise between allowing tutors their…

I've written about this in an earlier blog posting, but I wanted to turn up for the screening of the film of the two days' acivities in the Talbot Rice Gallery.  The film was interesting (I don't appear in it, thank goodness, given my dance abilities…), and music was great.  Watch it.  I think it…

Beyond Text is an AHRC-funded project which sets itself the ambitious goal of enabling lawyers, law educators and law students to use their ethical imagination.  The project seeks to do so by creating  a space where the ethical imagination can be inculcated and the movement beyond can be experienced in non-textual ways. We want to…

Attending the CETIS conference today — we've all been asked to blog pre-conference on the following issues: If you were able to plan a 10 year programme of trans-disciplinary research and technology (ICT) development, what challenge would you address and what would your programme look like? What challenges can you see where there are identifiable…

Last week I was at the University of Oxford Learning Institute, giving a paper on professional learning.  The session was chaired by Chris Trevitt (my thanks to him), and the SIMPLE project featured largely in it.  Good questions and discussion afterwards – slides at Slideshare here.