Category: Uncategorized

U. of California at Berkeley has been posting teaching videos on YouTube — see here or here.  Good idea, but am I the only one to wonder why they’re videotaping actual lectures?  This doesn’t play to the new medium at all, unless it’s got pretty high production values, and a very engaging speaker, and even…

My first encounter with hypertext was Guide Hypertext, courtesy of Des O’Brian, my erstwhile tutor at GU Eng Lit Dept, and director of the STELLA lab, now part of HATTI, I believe.  That was back in 1989.  Having seen his experiments with Passus XX of Piers Plowman, I was hooked.  I spent over 16 hours…

My book, Transforming Legal Education, was published on Friday – website accompanying it is here.  Apart from advertising the book the site contains a wiki that will be the launchpad for another, much more ambitious and adventurous publication, called the Transforming Initiative.

Been reading the Carnegie Report on law teaching and learning in the States (see here, and see here for the brief online report).  The online report is good, but it doesn’t do justice to the book.  I think this is one of the best books on legal education to be published in a long time,…

In May I spent two weeks in Hong Kong and Brisbane, working with staff at the U. of HK Law School and Griffith U. Law School on e-learning stuff.  Jet lag and culture shock apart it was an absorbing experience to spend a week with staff in another institution, to work in detail with them…

Presented a set of slides at the BILETA 2007 conference on the SIMPLE project last month.  The slot was a milestone experience in a lot of ways.  Michael Hughes and Gavin Maxwell, our applications developers, have been hard at work for the past six months and more, putting together specs for the platform and tools,…

Interesting summary by Axel, of Queensland University of Technology of general direction of the interactive web, suggesting amongst other things a new set of digital competences, C4C: creative, collaborative, critical, communicative.  Nothing new in one sense, as Axel pointed out, but in another sense it’s hard to make sense of Web 2.0 processes without taking…

Gunther’s points raised many interesting issues.  I raised some of them, but I’ll elaborate on these here, because I think they illustrate what he was talking about, but go beyond them in one sense, and also contain issues that we need to think about re the nature of the relationship between learning and technology.

Attending the ICE conference at Ross Priory, and just listened to a fascinating paper by Gunther Kress.  I’ve been wanting to hear him talk about new technologies and literacy for some time, and wasn’t disappointed.

Been a while since I last posted, but I’ve spent the last five months or so finishing up a book that really started when I was a law student, on legal education, so that’s been taking up all available brain space, and left none for blogging.  No more!  I’ve handed it in to the publisher,…

On the Carnegie Foundation site, I read Lee Shulman’s distinctions between thinking and acting: During my decade of work on medical diagnosis, I studied gifted internists to understand how they made diagnostic judgments. A good friend, the Australian surgeon Ken Cox, came to me one day and said, "Lee, you’re doing pioneering work on internists,…

Wrestling with Krieger’s use of Patel’s cognitive findings, mentioned in the last posting.  Actually quite profound consequences not just for the implementation of PBL in legal education, but for transactional learning as well.  While on that journey, came across ideas & references on frames that I need to set down before I forget them…