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Day one Session one Larry Farmer and David Binder welcomed us to the conference.  David Binder started us off with an interesting overview of his teaching techniques which included the use of T-funnelling to direct client attention, using transcript analysis.  Videotaping was used, of client interviews and analysis of student notes.  He also used a…

Just a quick mention that there’s a new blog on the block – the Standardized Client Initiative, which will detail our experiences in using standardized clients for learning, feedback and assessment of interviewing skills at the GGSL and elsewhere.  Our experiences in using the technique (derived largely but not wholly from medical education) have been…

Karen and I are in Los Angeles this weekend, at a conference in UCLA to talk about the Standardised Client Project.  This is an international initiative to develop the use of lay people in the teaching and assessment of legal interviewing skills.  It’s a method that derives from medical education — see this article in…

Giving a talk to the final KODOS conference in the Netherlands, Spelend leren in virtuele werelden, Delft, 27.9.06.  The question I set myself was basically how far can we go in the use of simulation in professional legal education.  Slides are under Publications to the left, but the short answer is, all the way.  There’s…

At UK Centre for Legal Education we currently have a project on e-portfolios within legal education. We were granted funding from the Higher Education Academy and JISC and there are three pilot projects ( Strathclyde University, Oxford Institute of Legal Practice and University of Westminster) which will contribute to the final outcomes. We set out…

As a relief from the Blackboard predation (and here) I turned to terranova and found Ren Reynolds on maps of the metaverse, and behold, I was creating maps of learning all over again.  One of his commentators drew me to a fine cybergeography site I’d long since forgotten about.  Quaere: which one of the many…

At the BILETA Conference in 2001 in Edinburgh there was a paper by Jim Tunney of Abertay University, Scotland called The Reflexive Relationship between Computer Games Technology ( CGT) and the Law. The paper argues for more use to be made of CGT and concludes ‘CGT is ideal for legal education in the widest sense…

Communicative power often grows exponentially at the time of revolutionary events, and finds its own channels. Before the 1789 revolution in Paris, there were around sixty newspapers throughout France. By the middle of 1792 there were around 500 in Paris alone. Many of them were short-lived, with a tiny circulation. But what is remarkable is…

Found an old cutting last night from The Guardian  (traveller from an antique land) — profile interview with Jaron Lanier, by Oliver Burkeman.To set the scene, the article quotes Howard Rheingold (no citation): Virtual reality vividly demonstrates that our social contract with our own tools has brought us to a point where we have to…

Two favourite classics of ed. research.  First, the initial study, as far as I can determine, on curriculum drift: McKinney, W. L., Westbury, I. (1973) Theory and phenomenon in curriculum research: the curriculum as a social system.  Paper presented at American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting (58th, New Orleans, Louisiana, Feb 26 – March 1.…

Stay with that notion of the curriculum as song for a moment. How do we learn music (leaving aside oral musical learning & rehearsal for the moment [though that’s clearly the context of Chatwin’s aboriginal] since it’s a significantly different milieu), once we’ve learned the basics of reading it? 

I used to think that the concept of space was only problematic in virtual communities, but actually it’s pretty tough when we reach for it to think about education in bricks & mortar. The idea of the curriculum map mentioned in the last post, for instance. It’s quite an inspiring idea at first, if only…