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The above JISC group meets around three times a year.  These are valuable sessions, keeping those of us who go in touch with each other, and in touch with what JISC are planning to do. Today's session was held at the Lakeside Centre in Aston U., Birmingham.  More detail below the fold…

Great session today with Philip Plowden, Dean of Northumbria U. Law School, and around 16 members of staff from Northumbria U. At his invitation Michael Hughes and I travelled down to Newcastle and spent most of the day with staff from the Law School, Built Environment and Business School demonstrating the SIMPLE platform, showing the…

Simulation learning, like clinic, PBL, and other forms of situated learning environments, gives us great opportunities to transform assessment culture, both formative and summative assessment. Both types are still too oriented to the past, and rooted in an examination culture. Formative says: ‘this is how you did in this mini assessment — don’t make the…

Some of the evaluation outcomes of the SIMPLE project are very interesting indeed. A group of them stem from the concept of transactional learning that drives much of the simulation activity. A key question that arose as the sims proceeded related to how students actually formed knowledge through simulation activities. How did that happen, if…

The SIMPLE Project final report is now complete, and can be downloaded from the SIMPLE community site. Click on ‘The SIMPLE Project’ and below the project summary is a link to the report; or just click here. Below the fold is a summary of the project findings. I’ll be posting extracts on this blog in…

Back from the Mont Blanc massif, climbing with Euan, and then spending time with my friend Peter McCarey and his family in Chambesy, just outside Geneva. Did the trois monts route from Refuge du Cosmique (Mont Blanc du Tacul, Mont Maudit, then MB itself). We started out at 0130, but given the narrow weather window…

Was it David Lodge who said that conference going is to the academic community what pilgrimages were to folk generally in medieval Europe — you leave loved ones and home behind, go on journeys to unfamiliar places, meet new people, encounter new things, and come back home with an increased reputation for seriousness.

Final session. I’m dropping in on a stream that I wasn’t even aware of until John Joergensen at lunch pointed out that there’s a conference stream on open-access to primary legal materials. Stuart Sierra, Columbia, is working on The Next WestLaw Killer, by his own admission. Clearly there are links to international projects such as…

A widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within a ny separate HTML-based web page by an nd user. A Library widget box, accessing Blogger, Typepad, many other social software bits. Great idea, cinch to install, great access to Library too — guess how many students at Penn State…

Karen and Patricia presented on their work in e-portfolios at the professional end of legal education in Scotland, putting the whole approach into a professional educational framework outlined by Lee Shulman and others. Slides here. They described how e-portfolios can be used for summative assessment or formative learning purposes.

In her book Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Lisa Jardine has this passage, on the development of printing in northern Europe:

I’m at this session to see what it can say to me about SIMPLE and case management. The obvious use in education is CM and clinic – about a third of the audience are here from that background. Use of calendar entries, completed documents, case notes and timeslips — rules-based calendaring, sort of workflow stuff.…