• Conference: LETR – Five Years On

    The Legal Education and Training Review submitted its findings five years ago now – seems more like 15 years to be honest, so much has happened in the interim.  To mark the occasion, Jessica Guth of Leeds Law School at Leeds Beckett University has organised the above conference, taking place tomorrow.  LETR’s co-authors Julian Webb,…

  • Hemiola in legal education – afterthoughts on the Directions conference

    I’ve summarised my keynote in a blog post on the Osgoode Professional Development blog, so no need to comment on it here, except to say that the place of the arts in legal education design is a long-neglected area of educational research – more of that at the end of this blog post. This was…

  • Directions conference, parallel session 3

    Final parallel session.  First up, Richard Hedlund (Lincoln University Law School) on ‘Modernising the (property law) curriculum at Lincoln Law School’.  He focused on the direction and restraints he faced in his adaptations, having taught PBL at York U.  Pedagogy wasn’t discussed much at Lincoln, and he tried to change that.  There was spoon-feeding, and…

  • Directions conference, Future of legal education II

    The next slot of parallel sessions, and I’m attending the second future of legal education  session.  First up, Eugene Lim, City U of Hong Kong, on ‘Teaching jurisprudence in a ‘technology-enabled’ classroom: An experiment with experiential learning’.  Two questions – how can experiential learning be applied to the teaching of legal theory?  and how can…

  • Plenary: Julian Webb – ‘Beyond Futureshock – will there be a law school in 2040?’

    Next up, Julian talking about technological life, ‘onlaw’, future shock and towards an ‘onlaw’ curriculum.   He started by talking about technology – what is it?  He quoted Schon on technology extending human capability.  Julian focused on ICT – information & comms technology, and how these are at the centre of a major social shift to…

  • Directions conference, day 2, Plenary session

    First session, and we have Lyria Bennett Moses (UNSW, via skype), on ‘What law students need to know about technology’.  Lyria argued that students need to know how technology is affecting legal practice – forms of new literacy – in addition to legal literacy.  Doesn’t necessarily mean detailed knowledge of machine learning; but lawyers need…

  • Directions in Legal Education 2018, Chinese University of Hong Kong

    I’m speaking at CUHK Faculty of Law’s conference on teaching and learning in law – slides on Slideshare, and at the Slides tab above, titled ‘An exhibition of future law schools: three portraits and a seascape’. Am now attending the parallel session on Future of Legal Education.  First up, Geraint Howells, ‘Every pint bottle should…

  • Multimedia, multimodal: rip, mix, replay

    I gave a paper at Osgoode Professional Development (OPD) yesterday, on ‘Multimedia learning: 2002-18: A case study across a century of digital learning’ – slides beneath the Slides tab above.  Our focus in the workshop was the design of a set of multimedia resources in 2002/4 at the Glasgow Graduate School of Law (GGSL), and…

  • Legal Innovation & Education Workshop, Toronto

    I’m at Osgoode for the next couple of months, and yesterday attended the Legal Innovation & Education Workshop organised by the Winkler Institute for Dispute Resolution, Thomson Reuters (TR) and Osgoode Hall Law School‘s Office for Experiential Education, and held in TR’s downtown offices.  This is a mix of liveblog & later comment on the…

  • Final thoughts: UNSW legal education research conference

    This was a great conference.  I so enjoyed being back in Australia, meeting up with colleagues and friends again, and hearing what they were doing.  I wanted it to go on for days.  The programme is a tribute to the typical creativity and energy that legal educators in Australian law schools are putting into legal…

  • Day 2, Plenary roundtable, UNSW legal research conference

    Sally Kift first, talking on regulatory pressures.  She summarised the pressures.  She mentioned working with the profession to bring them with us, and the importance of ethical judgment as well as strategy, creativity, empathy, reasoning, social intelligence.  Sally argued that we need to be more active on the issue.  She argued as I did for…

  • Day 2, session 3, UNSW legal education research conference

    This session is called ‘Writing for Law’.  First up, Philippa Ryan (UTS), on ‘Teaching law students the role of discourse markers’.  To improve their self assessment skills, their academic legal writing and how technology works.  Use natural language processing (NLP) to create an app to show the features of good academic writing. Why teach students…