This event, hosted by SCiLAB, focused on two significant educational approaches in Law and related disciplines, namely the use of a new simulation platform, SIMple, along with the use of simulated clients (SCs). In more detail… SIMulated Professional Learning Environment (SIMple) SIMple is a digital simulation platform for use by law schools and other client-based disciplines…
Since I seem to be thinking about things past more than present or future at the moment, before this year’s end I want to mark the 20th anniversary of my blog. I started in 2005, around January, I think, on Blogger. Felt uneasy with the platform though, so quickly moved to Typepad, which was then…
I’ve been appointed to an honorary Liberty Visiting Fellowship at the School of Law, University of Leeds. I’m here working with colleagues in CIRLE, the Centre for Innovation and Research in Legal Education in the law school, and giving two seminars, chairing & presenting at a webinar, leading an early career researcher workshop and giving…
The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson once observed that if you wish to understand a culture, study its nurseries. There is a similar principle for the understanding of professions: if you wish to understand why professions develop as they do, study their nurseries, in this case, their forms of professional preparation. When you do, you will generally…
One of the initiatives I’ve been working on in the last 20 years is the Simulated Client Initiative. I’ve worked with a range of partners to establish SC projects internationally. I’ve also organised international workshops in London (Gray’s Inn), Canberra (ANU College of Law) and Toronto, which were liveblogged in this blog This month, people…
It was billed in the conference programme as the launch of the BILETA online teaching policy. But the document is more subtle and radical than this: a BILETA manifesto; not teaching-focused but learning-centred; not just online but education in the round. Why a manifesto, why now? There was a feeling that post-pandemic, with the drift…
Four papers. First up, Nick Scharf from East Anglia U, on an intriguing interdisciplinary topic: ‘Give the Drummer Some: Reflecting on the use of the drum kit to enhance student learning of copyright law’. As he describes it in his abstract ‘The approach outlined here breaks from the traditional question/answer/discussion structure of seminars and allows…
I’m at the two-day BILETA 2024 annual conference, held this year in Dublin, hosted by Dublin City University’s School of Law and Government. As an Honorary Vice President of BILETA I was invited by the Executive to participate in a roundtable on the newly-minted policy document, ‘A manifesto for the post-pandemic university’. The document describes…
First up, yours truly giving the second keynote, on legal education. Slides in the usual place at the Slides tab above, and can be downloaded from Slideshare. More of that at a later date. In the paper sessions, it’s legal education time, and Claudy Op den Kamp (Bournemouth) is first up, on ‘”Collagementary” as a…
The BILETA 2021 Conference will be kicking off next week – 0915 BST Wed 14 April – 1800 BST Friday 16 April. I’ve been organising this year’s online conference on behalf of Newcastle University Law School with the assistance of my super virtual assistant Kirsty Melvin. We have over 80 papers, two plenaries, two paper…
First of all apologies to all three of my readers who have got in touch to ask if I had departed this world or worse stopped blogging. It’s been an unconscionable time, but I’m still hanging in there. Been mega-busy with projects at Osgoode and my new role at Newcastle University Law School, and elsewhere…
We’ve organised student interviews with our Sim Clients (SCs) this academic year again in Osgoode Hall Law School. As before, we ran the project in the JD 1L, but this time in the first, not the second, semester. And as before we ran the project in Legal Process (subject leader Shelley Margot Kierstead, with the…