Digital Directions

BILETA 2010 - Future E-learning Strategies in Education

Bright and early with a 9am start, despite the excellent conference reception at the Vienna City Hall the previous night.  I provide a generic night-time image of the gothic towers, and not a photo of the delegates, particularly in the light of Diane Rowland's presentation on photography and privacy!  Speeches were given by the organiser, the chair of BILETA, and an Austrian member of parliament - welcoming us to the city.

Chairing this final session and blogging has been a challenge, but the last e-learning session was of interest as the speakers brought a wider dimension of e-learning in schools.  Bernhard Racz from the EU Network of Innovative Schools spoke about the increasing need for ICT skills across all age ranges.  Their e-skills week promotes not only the use of technology, but also the sharing and repurposing of materials across Europe.  This has constraints - firstly Bernhard noted the differences between copyright, but also the language barriers makes sharing less straighforward.  Termed TravelWell Learning Objects, the website defines and lists criteria for learing objects that 'travel well' and have value to an international audience.

The second speaker, Christian Dorninger from the Austrian Ministry of Education, also emphasised the point that the current generation of 'digital natives' expect technology in the classroom as it is used extensively in life in general.  Decreasing costs are allowing students to have laptops in schools but pedagogic approaches to teaching require some changes to make best use of the hardware and software.  Certification was also discussed to ensure general levels of competence, for example the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL).  Chrisian also spoke about community learning platforms, the use of Moodle and also simulations, which clearly resonates with many of the BILETA e-learning papers for law and higher education.

Gerald Futscheck, also president of the Austrian Computing Society (conference host), gave the third paper that furthered the discussion of certification, ECDL, etc. but also about more advanced requirements for those who wish to learin in depth, perhaps to create a more professional website or provide goods/services online.  Gerald looked to the benefits of IT certificates for society as a whole (information society) as well as for the particular graduates who undertake the tests for higher levels of knowledge and for job mobility.  Questions from the audience brought about discussion of a possible economic divide as the system in Austria does provide free certification for students (as it provides free education), but cannot provide the laptops or software licenses.

The fourth speaker, Thomas Menzel also from the Austrian Ministry of Education, furthered the discussion of Christian Dorninger regarding centralised IT services in Austria.  The IT department within the ministry (smaller than that of the University of Vienna) provides e-learning tools to schools through various webites such as bildung.at.  This paricular website allows teachers to browse for subject-specific materials for various levels of education and import these resources directly into their VLE for the school students.

BILETA 2010 - E-learning at the Vienna Universities: Round-table Session

I thought, whist in Vienna, I would attend this parallel as the last session of the day to see how two universities in Vienna are using e-learning.

The university law faculty is one of the oldest and largest faculties in Europe, with an e-learning strategy in place since 2005 for blended learning, or bLearning.  As the law in action involves human interaction, this strategy aims to keep legal education based largely on human interactions too.

 E-learning tools have helped with administration, facilitated communication between students in a more intelligent way than previous email systems, and the dissemination of exam results.  The key notions of the strategy are:

1. Law literacy - which may be delivered online and remotely

2. Law knowledge - to be provided on campus in real time and face to face

The official platform is Fronter (review in German), with Moodle used as a secondary alternative platform.  This VLE is also used for induction, exchange students, international seminars/papers and exams as well as the typical teaching materials.

E-learning at the more modern Vienna University of Economics and Business was also discussed - in particular the advent of web2.0 and social media tools such as user-driven content (wikipedia),  OER sites (iTunes), and social networks (facebook).  Strategies have been developed to take account of these technologies and develop their own VLE platform Learn@WU based upon open-source technologies  The website offers quite a wealth of information about the VLE in English.

BILETA 2010 - E-learning Tools II

The second e-learning tool session started with Sarah King and Angela Kerry who presented their Virtual Solicitors' Office at Birmingham City University.  Their emphasis is on the clients, their needs and reacting to the problem rather than solely concentrating on the legal issues and the 'right answer'.  This means that the scenarios are never really out of date, even if the law changes this is only related to the responses the students give to the scenarios.

The project received input from practitioners to ensure both a high degree of realistic content and to ensure the 'look and feel' is right.  Indeed the speakers indicated that the law practices are interested in the concept of the virtual office for CPD and ongoing training for solicitors working with clients.  They also gave an amusing set of 'out-takes' from the cutting room floor as they themselves featured in some of the video'd scenarios as the solicitor!

The second speaker was Paul Maharg, who along with Karen Barton and Patricia McKellar gave an overview of open education resources (their JISC funded project) which will be followed by a workshop tomorrow afternoon.

Paul classified three types of OER initiatives:

• Institutional - for example Open University (OpenLearn) which is also a marketing tool as students see the value of what is publicly available and also interactive.  Paul presented the stats for user access at MIT, the largest OER with no proprietary wall.  3.7 million iTunes / Youtube downloads suggests a huge audience!
• Disciplinary - where subject specific materials are reposited.
• Pedagogic - for particular approaches and methods for learning.

Karen and Patricia then gave an overview of the SimShare project, which will allow users to download simulations, change them if required for their own purposes, and then upload new additions back onto the site.  Sustainabilty appears not to be the main issue, rather it is the Community of Practice (CoP) needed to get things started and creating content as a 'commons-based peer production'.

The speakers finished with a call for simulations (not necessarily SIMPLE-based, or particularly complex) and for academics to become involved, not just from law, but from other disciplines too.

BILETA 2010 - New E Learning Tools I

The first of several e-learning sessions at BILETA began after lunch.

My own paper on using delicious for collaborative shared resources is online at slideshare.  Questions focussed on dealing with disputes, if students felt that academic papers were wrongly annotated or inappropriate tags were used.  Further discussion looked at whether collaborative work was disadvantageous and that good students would be 'carrying' weaker students, although the experience itself is on its own is a personal learning experience.

BILETA 2010

View more presentations from Michael Bromby.

The second speaker, Erich Schweighofer from Vienna, gave an interesting paper on semi-automatic marking for legal essays.  The challenge of marking large numbers of student essays with low numbers of faculty/staff has led to the development of a computer system to analyse essay content.  This reminded me of the comparative paired methodology SWAP workshop that I attended in Jan 2009.  Erich's system can be seen as more consistent than human marking, but may not always be as accurate for longer written essays.  Indeed multiple choice and short answers can be graded easily and accurately by computer systems.

Pheh Hoon Lim (Auckland University) presented a comparative paper regarding copyright (essentially a legal test with plagiarism (which is an ethical test).  Looking to the older case of Pike v Nicholas [1869] and the more recent da Vinci case.  An interesting table gave examples of when copyright is infringed, when plagiarism occurs, when attribution can be a defence, and when it cannot.

BILETA 2010: A History of Legal Informatics

Following welcome addresses from both the Law and Computer Science faculties, the conference chair (Erich Schweighofer) officially opened the conference and a panel of speakers gave a plenary address.

 Abdul Paliwala spoke of, and paid homage to, the pioneers of the past (Martin, Susskind, de Mulder & Leith) and looked to the future with possible new jurisprudence, a reversal of emphasison IT law to Legal Informatics, and a new culture with web2.0, creative commons and open access legal inforation such as WorldLII.

Abdul alsopresented the 9th volume of the LEFIS Series, which celebrates the 25th anniversary of BILETA as a organisation and conference organiser.  Conference delegates received a copy of the book, BILETA institutional members will also receive a copy and so will a number of academic departments developing countries.

The chapters within the book are also available in the first edition of the newly re-named European Journal of Law and Technology (EJLT), previously known at JILT, but still within the group of Electronic Law Journals.  The first such edition of EJLT (vol 1, no 1) was released by Abdul at the conference and can now be viewed online at: http://ejlt.org//issue/current.

BILETA 2010 - Re-entering the e-conveyancing Matrix

BILETA: The British and Irish Law, Education and Technology Association does like to promote a more global conference than just British and Irish issues, delegates and indeed venues - so BILETA 2010 comes to Vienna and the remarkable central buildings of the Universität Wien.

Starting with parallel sessions, Moira MacMillan presented a paper co-authored with Martin Jones, both from Glasgow  Caledonian University.  Following a historical overview of land registration in Scotland,  Moira illustrated how an enabling Electronic Communications Order has allowed certain documents to be registered online.

There has been a low take up of ARTL online transactions amongst Scottish solicitors - in part driven by the need for both parties to be using the same system.  The Law Society of Scotland has set up a mandate system to allow solicitors to use an e-signature on behalf of clients for the ARTL system.  The e-signatures are provided to solicitors by Registers of Scotland as the sole certification service provider.  95% of deeds that could be registered with ARTL are still lodged as physical paper writs, illustrating a low take up, but proposals are in place from the Scottish Law Commission to amend the law in this area.

Moira suggested that there was a missed opportunity by not including electronic missives in the original 2006 ARTL Order and encouraging a wider use by reducing time and cost.
Discussion took place with the audience about whether a new driver is required: to educate the new generation and promote future by the lawyers of tomorrow; or whether a stronger drive to move from electronic registration to full electronic conveyancing is needed.

BILETA 2010 - Ah, Vienna...

Apparently Windows 7 started life as codename Vienna, and there is even a current facebook campaign to get the Ultravox song to the top of the UK singles chart by 4 April 2010.  There's also coffee and cakes...

However, more importantly the Austrian capital will be hosting the imminent BILETA conference from Sunday 28 - Tuesday 31 March.

The full programme is available here, and there are a number of interesting e-learning papers with three sessions on 'E-learning Tools' and even sessions on 'Legal Issues of E-learning' and 'Future E-learning Strategies in Education'.  In addtion there will be a round table session on 'E-learning at Vienna University'.  A workshop on the last day will also focus on 'Multisensory Law and Legal Education' so this conference does seem to offer a wide spread of papers on education, as well as the usual papers on information and technology.

There's also a Heuriger at a local  wine tavern and a reception at the Vienna City Hall as part of the conference social events.  I will bring blog reports from the conference, but much reather depends on how good these two events turn out to be!

This is the 25th BILETA conference, and therefore a bit of a milestone for the organisation.  Having visited a range of diverse hosts across Britain and Ireland, the organisation has ventured further afield to conferences in Amsterdam and Malta in the past.

Open Educational Resources - Simulation Learning

UKCLE have a project that is part of the Higher Education Academy/JISC Open Educational Resources Programme: SimShare.

3 workshops across the UK are scheduled, and the first took place recently in Cardiff.  Still to come are York (21 April) and Edinburgh (19 May) and places are still available.

The workshops aim to offer and experience where you will:

• Learn about OER and how you can be a part of it.
• Have access to a wealth of free resources for teaching.
• Have help in getting started in using simulation as a form of teaching, learning and assessment.
• Practise assembling a simulation on paper and have access to online resources to help you do this.
• Know how to download and upload resources to our OER website.

The slides from the workshop are available online and can be clicked through below.

Cardiff OER slides

View more presentations from Paul Maharg.

Paul Maharg has also blogged about this event at Zeugma and you might also be interested the SimShare blog at http://ukclesimoer.edublogs.org.

SSRN - law schools and Research Paper Series

The Social Sciences Research Network is "devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research and is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences".  I've used it on and off over a few years to download papers from various academics, but only just got around to uploading my own papers recently.

Marie S. Newman (Out of the Jungle) recently asks whether universities, and law schools in particular, are considering the Research Paper Series, or branded approach to collating all papers from all staff, or perhaps thematic collections of papers from staff.  Indeed, the The Legal Scholarship Network (LSN) is directed by two US academics and is mainly US in terms of content - see here for the full list of the LSN Research Paper Series.

 Most of the ones listed are from the US, but Ulster's Transnational Justice Institute has a series and so have Warwick, LSE Legal Studies, Queen Mary, Oxford and Westminster law schools.  Each page can be badged, much as what Marie was discussing in her blog post, but there is a financial cost to setting up the series.

For me, the benefits seem to be:

• Working Papers or 'work in progress' can be uploaded
• Seminar papers from external visitors could be collated
• Papers published elsewhere can be entered, so long as an exclusive copyright isn't assigned
• It brings together all outputs from across a school or grouping
• Downloads and views can be tracked
• Citations are linked when citing papers are within SSRN
• Gives greater exposure, serendipitous finds etc.
• Fairly short links can be given on a website or CV

The all-time Top 10 for the LSN (downloads since 1997)is an interesting collection.  Daniel Solove's 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy had 226,199 views and 81, 974 downloads yet had only been cited in one other paper within the SSRN.  Google Scholar (yes, I know, Google is making me stupid and I will address this in the next blog post!) gave me 50 citations, so this functionality doesn't work so well with SSRN.  You can also link to other papers by the same author, and SSRN lists other papers that other people viewed and then downloaded.

In relation to cost, I don't seem able to find the 'price list', but it is free for the single user, such as myself, but schools or centres would probably need a critical mass of contributors and/or papers to make it worthwhile.  SSRN suggest that an 'increase in readership' can be obtained, but I suspect that the downloading of scholarship has to be compared to what was available before - this is likely to be university staff or school/centre homepages that are perhaps incomplete, or do not monitor downloads.

Information Snacking

The 'Big Question' for last month from Tony Carrer's blog was this:

"Instruction in an Information Snacking Culture?"  There are a lot of aspects to this question:

• Has there really been a shift? Are people changing their information consumption? Are they really snacking more?
• Do we need to think about instruction differently? Is it a matter of better design so that people are engaged beyond a snack?
• Is this a problem? I feel like it's harder to get a deep conversation going, especially in a twitter world. But maybe that's me. How can we effectively work and learn in an information snacking world?

I'd like to tackle the question with legal education in mind, and consider how students (or at least mine in particular) snack on information, and where they get their snacks from.  This links a little to my LILAC presentation on web2.0 and unconventional sources last month when I considered how both staff and students are equipped to evaluate the value of blogs as possible reference sources for essays and publications.

In relation to the first part, I'm not sure there has been a shift, but perhaps things are shifting.  My rough-and-ready review of student essay reference material found only a few 'unconventional sources' but this question targets how students find the material irrespective of what it actually is.

However, I do think there is an issue regarding the quality of the snack - the sat-fat and cholesterol-rich Google results (or even a basic Westlaw / Lexis search) need to be sifted through to find the leaner and more healthy morsels within.  My other problem is the sheer vastness of information available - journals and cases from every jurisdiction you can think of, and more from others you can't even think of.

As for the second part, I tend to agree with one of the comments from Bill that the hook or 'attention grabber' is more important than the bit-sized chunk that is presented - so, if the bait looks attractive, then the content will be digested irrespective of whether it is only several lines or more substantial at several pages.

Lastly, is it a problem? For me - yes!  I've nearly 400 unread items in my RSSaggregator that have been piling up since the Christmas break, most of which need to be skimmed and probably discarded, but there may be one or two healthy snacks to keep me going... that's if I get around to skimming them all.  Is it a problem for students?  I tend to think not... I've been providing RSS feeds within my VLE site from blogs and other sources of news, so I like to think that I'm providing a healthy diet for them.  The deep conversations are still emerging in the seminar room, occasionally provoked by one of these snacks.  What is nice is that the students are informing me of recent developments I hadn't yet seen, yet I placed the link there (in their minds)!

Betsy McKenzie has recently posted something on the Out of the Jungle blog about "Google Making Us Stupid?" but I'll digest and blog about that some other time...