Subject to the vagaries of air travel, I will arrive in Sydney later today to attend the UNSW Legal Education Conference. I’ll be presenting with my colleagues Alex Steel and Melissa Castan on some work we are doing developing a taxonomy of legal education research. More on that in another post.
In this post, I outline my thoughts on the state of publishing in Australian legal education. I’ll be presenting these as part of a plenary panel at the conference.
A male law professor mentioned to me recently that in his experience, if you just do your work, and do it well, then your career will progress – rewards will flow. I was somewhat taken aback by this statement and pointed out that this certainly was not my own experience, and was unlikely to be the experience of many women in academia. Indeed, I suspect this is not the case in any profession.
It got me thinking about the makeup of Australian law schools. We currently have many women law deans around the country – though I do note that some are punching above their weight, holding the role of dean at a substantive position lower than professor. The law school is a feminised work force in many respects – women are highly visible in so many law schools. However I suspect that this is because women form the bulk of our casualised workforce, teaching sessionally.
I wondered though about the makeup of the professoriate. With so many women – and so many capable women – one might expect that there would be equality in the upper ranks of the law school. Let’s see if the numbers bear this out.
Post by Kate Galloway and Melissa Castan. Cite as:
Kate Galloway and Melissa Castan, ‘Legal Citations 2.0’ Katgallow (21 June 2017) https://kategalloway.net/2017/06/21/legal-citations-2-0/
The leading work on legal citations in Australia is the Australian Guide to Legal Citation (‘AGLC’). The AGLC, currently working on a 4th edition, provides users with a comprehensive style guide for all legal writing from use of capitals, through to citation of international treaty materials. (For an example of the current application of the AGLC, see eg this article.)
The explosion of online and other digital sources poses a challenge to most standard r
eferencing styles – as is clearly articulated by Prof Patrick Dunleavy, in this post. For legal citation in Australia, much of this development has occurred since the publication of the third edition of the AGLC, making it timely to reconfigure some of the key guiding principles behind legal citation.
As editors of the Alternative Law Journal and the Legal Education Review respectively, Melissa Castan and I increasingly encounter diverse forms of reference and referencing. In response, and this post, we propose a reorientation of the analogue focus of the AGLC to adapt and address the digital landscape of legal scholarship.
A black swan is an event or occurrence that deviates beyond what is normally expected of a situation and is extremely difficult to predict.
The term ‘black swan’ derives from the story that the English had traditionally defined the word ‘swan’ as a bird that was white. Swans’ whiteness was integral to their ‘swanness’. When the English came to Australia and saw black swans, they were thrown by this completely unexpected event. If swans were by definition white, what was this black bird? It was impossible to have predicted the event of a black swan because of the circumscribed definition of swan.
Author Nicholas Taleb used the term ‘black swan’ in his best selling book. He suggests that we cannot predict the future if we expect the current circumstances to continue on the same trajectory as they have in the past. I think that the legal profession is in such a predicament.
Yesterday the Australian Minister for Education, Simon Birmingham, announced cuts to higher education funding and increases in student fees. In addition, the income threshold for repayment of student debt will be reduced. Funding for teaching will be reduced in 2019 by $380 million relative to the current funding formula.
Universities are huge institutions requiring significant funding to maintain their operations. Yet they face hefty competition from global and increasingly accessible, technologies. Instead of a future of under-funded universities, I see their devolution altogether – at least in terms of education, if not of research.
The change will not be quick. A higher degree (bachelors or above) is now the entry point for the regulated professions. These professions, including law, use course accreditation as a means of guaranteeing standards of graduate entry. For unregulated professions (such as marketing, or banking) the market determines the entry requirement, and that is generally a bachelors degree.
But things are changing, and universities’ role can no longer be taken for granted.
My previous post gave an overview of the Law Society of New South Wales’ flip Report, on the future of law and innovation in the profession. My overall impression is that the Report might provide a useful and very gentle overview of the road ahead, but fails to engage in any real sense with the way in which technology will – and already is – changing law and legal practice.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the chapter devoted to legal education. This poses a real limit on the possibilities for innovation – especially to the extent that regulatory bodies are likely to accept the Report’s statement that existing knowledge and skills must remain.
Old school ledger
I will start by answering the question in the title: I don’t know.
This post is directed principally at lawyers and legal academics, arguing that whatever the trajectory of Blockchain technology, it is sufficiently significant that we must attempt to understand it at some level at least to think critically about its potential implications.
Some lawyers, principally in Big Law firms with a large banking and finance client base, are deeply engaged in Blockchain including to suggest that it will open new fields of practice. Other lawyers understand but dismiss its potential. In my experience however, the majority is unaware of its existence or cannot really say what it is. This latter position is fair enough, because in my view it’s not easy to find a simple explanation that lacks breathless proclamations of a new world order.
I’m a newcomer, having bitten the bullet after I observed ‘chatter’ about Blockchain had reached a tipping point. In my social media feeds, in recent months it has moved from random mentions (innovators) to dedicated early-adopter status even reaching mainstream media… This must surely mean that it’s time for lawyers to become conversant in the technology and its possibilities (and limitations). This post is a low-tech overview of some of the issues, from a lawyer’s perspective.
Swans are necessarily white only if you display a lack of critical thinking
I have just spent a stimulating and inspiring two days at ANU College of Law in a consultation workshop as part of an important research project into Indigenous cultural competency for legal academics led by Marcelle Burns of UNE. The project is funded by the (now sadly defunct) Commonwealth Office of Learning and Teaching. This is a project of substance, and of national importance. The standing of the project leaders and those who participated in the workshop is testament to this.
I emerged from this overall positive discourse to news that former Prime Minister John Howard found ‘appalling’ the idea of a treaty with Indigenous Australians, and that former Prime Minister Tony Abbott dismissed a treaty out of hand. In the first place, Mr Abbott said, a treaty is entered into between two nations – I suppose he means that as a definitional question this is a logical impossibility, for Indigenous Australians hold no seat at the UN (incidentally an institution of which Mr Abbott does not approve). In the second place, Mr Abbott said that going down the path of treaty would spoil the chance for constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.
These two comments offer a case study in the very issues that occupied our thinking in the workshop. How could it be that two men could rise to be Prime Minister of Australia, senior lawmakers, with such an abject lack of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that sound in inter-cultural competence – a necessity for all professionals but in particular for lawyers.
The legal profession has been concerned for some time with the capability of law graduates for transnational practice. While much of the discussion in the context of the Australian legal profession has centered on knowledge, for example of private international law, there is inevitably an array of skills and attitudes that must accompany such knowledge to develop what might be called the global lawyer. This post teases out what those skills and attitudes might look like.
Technophobia? Or pedagogy?
But before you, the reader, prepares to take aim at me as a technophobe, or to launch celebrations at having found a kindred spirit who yearns for times of yore, let me explain.
My position is that technology is a tool, it is not the purpose of education. Further, all technology including even that of the lecture, should be selected purposefully according to principles of effective learning and teaching.
It is widely known that students use lecture capture for a few purposes. It allows for revision of the work covered in the lecture, and for revisiting complex ideas or ideas that the student missed in class. It also helps students who are unable to make class – they do not miss out on ‘the lecture’ because they can conveniently stream it in the comfort of their own home. Further, for students with English as a second language, neuroatypical students, and other students with diverse learning needs, the capture allows the student to engage with ‘the lecture’ on their own terms.
These are all very important goals, but none of these answer my question which is, why is lecture capture the best mode of achieving these goals? Are there not other technologies that can serve these purposes – perhaps even better?
There is a lot of concern voiced by academics about lecture capture driving students away from real life lectures, with negative consequences for student learning. That is not principally my own concern. Indeed I note that there are studies that discount the causative effect. My own view is that students should be able to select when and where they engage with their subjects.
This still, however, does not answer the question ‘why lecture capture’ and indeed it prompts the question ‘why lecture’ – both of which learning and teaching settings are nothing more than a tool. The real question, surely, is ‘what is the best tool for the job’.
Despite the widely-held contemporary view that lectures are a passive learning experience – is not a learning experience at all – they can be an engaging and even a transformative learning experience. Whether offered didactically or interactively, this format is live performance. It involves a relationship between lecturer and student. The lecturer must read the audience cues…pause, reiterate, deviate, advance, moderate. These decisions are made in relation to tempo, voice, gestures, body movement, eye contact, content, choice of words, visual cues. There may well be ‘content delivery’ but an effective lecture is no passive transaction.
This renders the face-to-face lecture a qualitatively different experience from a recording of that lecture. If we are lecturing for video, the performance to be effective might adopt quite a different tone or format. Think TED Talks. One point of difference of TED Talks is their brevity – not the two-hour traditional university lecture assiduously captured by university AV/IT systems. (They are also highly practised and professionally shot and edited.)
For lectures that take an interactive approach, the experience of viewing a recording must be infuriating. Gaps in ‘delivery’, unclear discussion in the background, and a static camera angle. The viewer is excluded from the room, an outsider in the learning experience.
Meanwhile, those in the room are under surveillance, their words and image potentially picked up by the capture system and exposing the student to the eyes of unknown others. I do not consider this a ‘safe’ learning environment, one in which I can in good conscience ask students to take risks. Further, I do not think we are modelling critical evaluation of privacy where we do not ask students to consider the privacy implications of the weekly broadcast. (Although I concede that privacy is pretty much dead in light of all the student data captured in analytics. Students are by now enculturated to be the product as well as the consumer of the processes of education.)
All of this is aimed at what I suspect is the end game of content delivery. Yes, examining the reasons for student use of lecture capture, the predominant purpose is going over that sweet, sweet content til they get it right. If that is the case, can we not package this content in a way that suits our educational design?
My preference would be that university policies encourage lecturers to consider the best way to support student learning through diverse channels. For me, it is an interactive, relational, dynamic, lecture experience unhampered by the constraints of static camera/microphone and concerns about privacy. I like to support student flexibility and choice through pre-prepared podcasts which have a few key features.
Student surveys reveal that my students value the podcasts as a means to enhance their learning, and I am satisfied that this format addresses the unstated intent of mandatory lecture capture policies.
I would prefer, however, to see a more clearly articulated and pedagogy-based approach to universities’ policies.
katgallow 