'Democracy begins in conversation’: the phenomenology of problem-based learning and legal education

Learning is complex for any number of reasons. One of these is that it doesn’t take place in a laboratory: it happens in real places, within and between real people, and as a consequence it takes place in multi-factorial environments. At every stage of learning in Higher Education (HE), from student choice of institution and programme, to the transfer of learning from theory to practice, to a single institution’s or a teacher’s evaluation of teaching and learning, there are many causal factors that affect educational process and outcome. The complexities and variables created by the interaction of such multiple factors, well known in the field of education, make learning a highly complex phenomenon to analyse and understand

Editorial: BILETA special issue: Technology and Legal Education

Fragmentation and convergence are two discoursal lenses that have been used to view changes that have taken place in the domains of legal services,the legal profession, regulation and legal education. While they may appear orthogon al, the relationships between them are intimate, sophisticated, constantly shifting and require much more analysis. In this paper I shall argue that law schools need to engage with both processes for they are powerful actants upon the way we perceive our schools and our roles within them. They are also powerful forces upon what and how we teach, and the nature of the knowledge that is the focus of our heuristics. To exemplify this argument and to begin to examine its strength as a tool for analysis I shall focus on one area of legal education, namely the three fields of legal information literacies, legal informatics and legal writing. I shall argue that the sum of the convergence of all three would significantly improve the educational effects of the parts in our curricula. I shall explore how studies in New Media on media convergence give us models for such convergence, and can reveal the educational effects that the process may bring about

Virtual learning environments in action

In this workshop Paul and Patricia demonstrated the webcast lectures developed at Glasgow Graduate School of Law as part of a learning environment where students can take control of their own learning experience. They outlined the practical benefits of such a learning environment for both professional and undergraduate legal education, and discussed the theoretical implications of this approach for the pedagogy of legal education

Interview met Paul Maharg

Paul Maharg is professor of law at the Australian National University College of Law and Nottingham Law School, and author of Transforming Legal Education – Learning and Teaching the Law in the Early Twenty-first Century. Maharg has been re-thinking current forms of legal education, the role of emotions therein and use of technology in educating legal professionals that matter for the future of law practice

Disintermediation

Disintermediation is a concept well-understood in almost all industries. At its simplest, it refers to the process by which intermediaries in a supply chain are eliminated, most often by digital re-engineering of process and workflow. It can often result in streamlined processes that appear more customer-focused. It can also result in the destruction of almost entire industries and occupations, and the re-design of almost every aspect of customer and client-facing activity. To date, legal education in particular has not given much attention to the process. In this article I explore some of the theory that has been constructed around the concept. I then examine some of the consequences that disintermediation is having upon our teaching and learning, and on our research on legal education, as part of the general landscape of digital media churn; evaluate its effects, and show how we might use aspects of it in two case studies that are, effectively, versions of the future of legal education