the wrong story: regulation and legal ed tech
TRANSCRIPT
The Wrong Story:Regulation and LegalEdTech
Paul Maharg
LawTechCamp 2
1. Policy-makers, regulators and educators need to radically rethink legal educational culture, practices and infrastructure.
2. Regulation should help us to develop new theory, re-discover old heuristics & develop imaginative forms of teaching & learning with new technologies.
3. It’s effective and cost-effective, but…4. we need to re-design knowledge representation, learning
resources, staff roles, institutional roles, in the digital world. Remember Kodak, Encycl. Brit., journalism, music industry, ‘creative destruction’ etc…
the argument
LawTechCamp 3
what’s wrong with legal ed tech?
Undergraduate:
Dull. Lack of focus or institution-focused only Info-push, doesn’t encourage
individual voice Lack of social networking nous Little linkage with pre-programme, post-programme No links with the rest of our social lives No sense of the internet as a space for living, thinking,
communicating, ie as an affinity space (cf Goethe’s Elective Affinities)
LawTechCamp 4
what’s wrong with legal ed tech?
Postgraduate vocational:
Dull. Lack of focus or institution-focused only Info-push, doesn’t encourage professional voice Lack of social networking nous Little linkage with undergrad or professional lives Where’s the professional software that lawyers use? No sense of the internet as a space for earning, pro bono,
professional communities.
LawTechCamp 5
Why regulate this area?
LawTechCamp 6
Technology is criticalto
educational context
LawTechCamp 7
Eg: Graphics Finding devices Text layout Use of colour Informational structure User engagement Use of adjacency &
juxtaposition for mnemonic purposes
LawTechCamp 8
Think of aggregation as:1. the social media of our
students’ nested lives2. a genealogy of knowledge
where there is texturaand the developmentaround them of debate, analyses (glossa) whichchange in real time
3. an ethical practicecommunity thatdevelops much fasterthan medieval scholarlycircles
iPad + wireless + glossa
LawTechCamp 9
Technologycan enableinnovation
LawTechCamp 10
legal learning
LawTechCamp 11
LawTechCamp 12
how to be innovative & creative?
Useful contextual planning tool: CHAT mediational activity (after Engerström)
LawTechCamp 13
the CHAT framework
Eg in collaborative simulations…
LawTechCamp 14
How to regulate…?
LawTechCamp 15
how not to regulate…
Debate around ABA Standard 306 (now 311), restricting distance learning vis-à-vis classroom time:
Standard 311. DISTANCE LEARNINGDistance education is an educational process in which more than one-third of the instruction of the course is characterized by: (1) the separation in time or place, or both, between instructor and student; and (2) the use of technology to deliver instruction.
LawTechCamp 16
regulatory alternatives?
‘While distance education can be analogized to classroom time, it would seem that a better approach is to think about what we want education to accomplish – knowledge of subjects needed to be a lawyer, inculcation of skills and values necessary to be a good lawyer, and some experiential component – then set out how any program proves that it does so.’
Rakes, W.R. (2007). From the Chairperson. Syllabus. American Bar Association section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, 38(2), 2-3.
Or
LawTechCamp 17
regulatory alternatives?
OER:
Institutional OER
Disciplinary OER
Pedagogic OER, eg Simshare
LawTechCamp 18
regulatory alternatives?
Shared spaces concept in traffic zones: Redistributes risk among road users Treats road users as responsible, imaginative, human Holds that environment is a stronger influence on
behaviour than formal rules & legislation.
‘All those signs are saying to cars, “this is your space, and we have organized your behavior so that as long as you behave this way, nothing can happen to you”. That is the wrong story’.
Hans Monderman, http://www.pps.org/reference/hans-monderman/
LawTechCamp 19
participative regulation
Portrait of the regulator as: QE, not QA – Quality Enhancer, insisting on innovation,
imagination, change implementation A hub of creativity, shared research, shared practices &
guardian of debate around that hub Initiating cycles of funding, research, feedback,
feedforward Archive of technological memory in the discipline Founder of interdisciplinary, interprofessional trading
zones
