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OER10 Conference
Spent 2.5 days at the OER10 conference, Clare College, Cambridge. Fascinating collection of papers and demos. I was there discussing the UKCLE Simshare, with Patricia McKellar of UKCLE — slides here. Highlights for me included Tom Browne's session on The Challenge of OER to Academic Practice. Tom outlined some of the problems that he encountered…
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JISC Learning & Teaching Experts meeting, Birmingham
Great meet-up, as always. Dizzying number of fascinating projects. The day's slides and resources available here. Too fast & furious to live blog, too busy taking it all in and applying to my own practice. Most were not cutting-edge applications, but they were imaginative, carefully-planned implementations of technology that can inspire you to adapt and…
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Doors and windows: simSHARE – OERs in Simulation Learning Workshop, Cardiff
Live-blogging bits of this posting re the above workshop, which is part of the dissemination activities of the UKCLE OER project. For a summary of the day's activities, see here. Slides for my presentation on why we might want to use sims are up on Slideshare. There were 20 or so folk present — what…
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LILAC: Visions of Legal Education
The panel discussion, chaired by Avrom and responding in part to the film produced by UKCLE, started with useful contributions from Chris Maguire, Melissa Hardee and Roger Burridge. There were spirited responses from the floor but the debate resolved yet again into an either/or, between versions of the liberal law school and versions of the…
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Dealing with new technologies in higher education: the analogy of road design
I guess that, following on from my last rather downbeat posting of 2009, this is a much more upbeat appraisal of what technologies do to/for us. I cycle pretty regularly to work, and on a variety of bikes — mountain bike, recumbent trike, folder, occasionally my trusty Mercian roadster. Apart from the occasional bout of…
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LILAC: Andrew Cook, James Faulconbridge: The firm as a new actor in legal education: implications for lawyers’ identity formation.
[Again, no access so this is being largely written and uploaded much later] Their study was funded by the ESRC – analysed the training & education of solicitors, including LPC & GDL and traineeship – the role of the university vis a vis the sociology of the professions. Interesting on the issue of transnational ‘universities’ hosted…
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LILAC: Keynote, Aaron Porter.
Aaron Porter's keynote was good — very fluent, very political (he's vice-president (HE) with the National U. of Students), nicely balanced and with a great last line. What he said about induction and feedback (re the NSS) was undeniable — Michael Bromby has summarised some of it over on Directions. I can’t resist joining the…
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LILAC: Andrew Francis, Hilary Sommerlad: Access to legal work experience — lessons for legal education
[Not quite live blogging — room had no wireless access…] Arrived late: too much talk and coffee. Initial focus was examining students in their second year of an undergraduate law degree. 55.4% had some form of legal work experience; 45.9 of post 92 students had had work experience, compared to 66.4% of pre 92 institution…
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Live blogging LILAC: Parallel 1: Abdul Paliwala: Socrates & Confucius: A Long History of Information Technology in Legal Education
Very interested to hear Abdul on this. Socratic and Confucian learning — both, in Abdul's view, were highly focused on dialogic learning and on ethics. He drew fascinating lines of comparison between the two. Socratic learning (in the Platonic dialogues) > Protagorean questioning > Langdellian so-called [my take on it…] socratic questioning, leading (in the…
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Live blogging LILAC: Parallel 1: Simulation and Criminal Law: Amy Musgrove, Vicky Thirlaway
Live blogging at LILAC. First session I attended was Amy Musgrove & Vicky Thirlaway, on a sim in Criminal Law. They went through the initial process of how they arrived at simulation. Usual issues – retention, progression, traditional assessment, etc with a class of 400 students. The new assessment regime was a double module. In a pilot…
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Understanding what technology does for/to us
Over at Slashdot, the story that hospital computerization didn't save money nor did it improve administrative efficiency. The study, published in The American Journal of Medicine, was carried out by Harvard Medical School on a dataset consisting of around 4000 hospitals over the period 2003-07, with admin cost data from Medicare Cost Reports and other…