• Equal access to the internet: a human rights analysis

    Cathy Easton, Lancaster U. (again) on the above.  80M disabled citizens of the EU and a further 87M EU citizens over 65 who cd benefit from a more accessible internet.  Only 39% of EU public sector websites at both a supra-national and domestic level reach an appropriate level of accessibility.  Tearing through the stats here,…

  • Judge, camera, action

    Couldn’t blog the paper entitled Making Schools Responsible for Cyberbullying — UEA connection went down… This session, the last but one legal education paper, is Michael Bromby (MB) — subtitled, Legal education and the regulation of recording and broadcasting proceedings in court.  Context was the Judicial Office for Scotland Review, 2013, and administration of Justice…

  • A low-tech solution to teaching: the book club as an educational tool

    Andrew Murray, LSE, on NOT using technology — Book Club.  Why?  Community building and the need for that, between students who have little in common — 360 students from over 140 countries on the LLM he teaches.  Shared texts such as Orwell and Kafka are points in common.  Also teaches interpretive skills, esp for students…

  • After the hype: MOOCs and legal education

    Next up, Cathy Easton, Lancaster University, on MOOCs and legal education.  Gave an overview of MOOCs, and the infrastructure behind the online product.  In the UK, in addition to the US models of Coursera, edx  and udacity, there’s Futurelearn.  Free of course, but you can get a certificate at a cost.  So MOOCs are being…

  • Distance learning – a step into the future

    Rosemary McIlwham, from the OU, on online learning.  Defined online learning, described most law schools as at information sharing, top in Shackel’s hierarchy.  Next is active and or interactive learning, then deep learning through analysis and application of principles, and finally total immersion in the e-learning facilitation of higher order decision-making.  Rosemary wasn’t sure about…

  • BILETA 2014 keynote: Sarah Glassmeyer

    0900 start, unusual for the morning after the conference dinner, so yr intrepid correspondent is doing well to be here for Sarah Glassmeyer‘s keynote, digits on more or less the right keys. A law librarian by background, she works with CALI as content director.  Big changes in virtually all jurisdictions, eg access to justice crisis,…

  • BILETA Conference 2014, UEA

    Am liveblogging the BILETA 2014 conference at the University of East Anglia.  I missed last year’s Liverpool conference, so it’s great to be here amongst BILETA colleagues again.  Multiple streams, so can only provide a snapshot of some.  Am in the IP stream, and first up, Chen Wei Zhu, from Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in…

  • Parables, climbing & King Lear

    Check out the discussion over at Kris Greave’s PLT Educators Australasia LinkedIn forum on personal opinions in teaching & learning which somehow ended up with theological exegesis, a video of the astonishing Ueli Steck and King Lear in a Kelp Store.  Let no one tell you legal education is dull…

  • Our data: free and open-access

    Recently I was trawling a publisher’s website for a technology article (Springer, since you ask), with no-access pages and tariff barriers all around me, when a cheeky wee popup asked me: Would you use a data collaboration website to share your research data with colleagues? Yes, publicly Yes, but only privately No I don’t have…

  • The journey to Scotland

    On 18 September Scotland will go to the polls to decide its future.  We will be asked the question, ‘Should Scotland be an independent country?’  If there is a majority vote in favour, Scotland will gain independence from UK.  How should we vote?  Here’s my view of the landscape…

  • Now we are three: Emerging Legal Education book series

    Beth Mertz and I, co-editors of the Emerging Legal Education series, have just signed a renewal of the three-year contract for this Ashgate book series on legal education.  Hardly seems like three years since we signed the first, with Caroline Maughan as the third editor (Caroline has now retired from her post at UWE, and…

  • Research skills and the researchers of tomorrow

    More on research skills, this time on the wider context from Jisc.  Their report, out in 2012, revealed the serious problems and the huge potential of the digital shift.  Over a project span of three years Researchers of Tomorrow analysed the working practices of  around 17,000 doctoral students born between 1982 & 1994, the so-called Gen…