Zeugma

Keynote, CELTS conference: Melissa Hardee

Melissa Hardee started out by defining professionalism, then asking if we can teach professionalism.  She took a variety of definitions, coming down on a general definition of professionalism as being more than the sum of rules and regulation, and more than a matter of behaviour.

CELTS Conference, 30 March 2009, University of Strathclyde

Every year professional legal educators from the smaller jurisdictions in these isles get together for an annual conference - small-scale, but valuable, because the scale of small jurisdictions creates its own opportunities and its own problems.  This year we're hosting the conference in GGSL, University of Strathclyde Law School.  The theme is professionalism, and I'm going to introduce the theme to the conference by telling two interlinked stories...

Open Educational Resources (OER)

UKCLE is leading a bid for funding from HEFCE, through JISC, to development OER for the law subject centre. Partnering with Strathclyde University, and in particular with our law school and Management Science, in addition to the law schools of the Universities of Glamorgan and Warwick, the bid focuses on the development of resources for simulation in law and in other disciplines.  It's a small start to a significant development for all law schools, which I explore below the fold.  

SIMPLE @ Legal Workshop, Australian National University

Michael Hughes and I were invited to the Legal Workshop, at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra.  Over the course of a week at the start of March we worked with academic staff, educationalists and IT staff to produce a series of pilot simulations on their Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice.  We gave numerous presentations over the course of five days, held a series of four pilot planning sessions with lead tutors in areas of Family, Real Estate, Government and Commercial and other informal sessions to produce the skeleton of four simulations in record time.   We travelled out on Thursday 26 Feb, arriving back in the UK on Sunday, spending a total of five days with staff.  It was exhilarating to work with staff in such detail, and it has changed our ideas about creating transformative moments – five days of intensive work produced what I hope is significant change, more than I’ve seen anywhere else; and it’s a model I’d like to replicate elsewhere.  Just why it worked is worth dwelling on.