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The more I think and read about the spiral/viral concept, the more I’m convinced that they actually need major re-design of a curriculum to work.  In fact, significant shift in the forms of teaching learning and assessment require not only teaching events to be re-designed (‘constructive alignment’), but the student timetable needs considerable re-design as…

Actually, the spiral curriculum is close in concept to Reigeluth’s ‘elaboration theory’ – see English, R.E. & Reigeluth, C.M. (1996). Formative research on sequencing instruction with the elaboration theory. Educational Technology Research & Development, 44(1), 23-42; Hoffman, S. (1997). Elaboration theory and hypermedia: Is there a link? Educational Technology, 37(1), 57-64.

Literature is considerable.  With reference to law, see Freeman, R. (1998) Tell-show-do: reducing anticipatory anxiety in emergency paediatric dental patients, International Journal of Health Promotion and Education, 36, 87-102.  See also Brigman, G, Molina, B. (1999), Developing social interest and enhancing school success skills: a service learning approach. The Journal of Individual Psychology, 55:3.  For…

I think it was way back in the early eighties that I first came across the idea of a spiral curriculum, but it was only when I put together the first couple of versions of the Foundation Course that I began to appreciate how useful it was.  I also understood it needed more that a…

Having been recently discussing with Susan Stewart of Glasgow U. the idea of distributed cognition, I came across the concept of distributed narratives, in a posting by Jill Walker.  Her view of it can be seen as a refreshing view of what Shirky has called social software — blogs, flickr, plazes — Distributed narratives demand…

Attended an eLRC workshop at Manchester University – ‘Mapping the Landscape’.  Some interesting sessions, though structure was fuzzy.  But a quite inspirational plenary by Pierre Dillenbourg, Professeur de pédagogie et nouvelles technologies de formation at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.  He was talking about the potential of both theory and technology to fuse in…

Been thinking more about the discussion forum exchange with the student, Sarah (name anonymised) I talk about in the Dublin paper.  This exchange between Sarah and myself is interesting because it doesn’t conform to the usual pattern of tutor-student communication.  In fact, it’s the exact opposite of what usually happens.  The classic modality of classroom…

For those of you who were at the conference and want to continue the discussion online, the ICT paper can be accessed under ‘Publications’ on the left.  Just use the ‘Comments’ function below.  Click on it and add to the ongoing discussion…

Struggling to write a paper?  Three grad students in a research group at MIT CSAIL have the answer — a program that can generate random research papers.  So far it’s restricted to the field of Comp Science, but it’s only a matter of time before some savvy law students see the gap in market (now…

To Edinburgh again, this time for the ALT Conference.  Met old friends again from down south – odd to see them in a Scottish context.  As always precious few Scottish faces, and those that were there were from the west.  What is it about Scottish legal education – why is there this inability to get…

Dewey didn’t agree with the concept of ‘teacher-proofing’ the curriculum.  In fact it is one of his enduring legacies that he constantly emphasises the development of teacher originality, and the importance of curriculum design in encouraging ground-up innovation within a curriculum.  It’s a struggle we’re still engaged in.   In an early version of Ronald Barnett’s…

To Edinburgh U.’s Old College last week for a seminar on legal education organised by George Gretton in the Raeburn Room.  Late, because I mis-remembered it as the Lorimer room and almost joined a Public International tutorial there.  So I missed George’s piece.  But the others focused largely on who taught Scots law (especially the…