Pecha Kucha presentation to Law Tech Camp, London, June, 2012.

1. The Wrong Story:
Regulation and LegalEdTech
Paul Maharg

2. the argument
4 Policy-makers, regulators and educators need to radically
rethink legal educational culture, practices and
infrastructure.
4 Regulation should help us to develop new theory, re-
discover old heuristics & develop imaginative forms of
teaching & learning with new technologies.
4 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…
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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)
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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.
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5. Why regulate this
area?
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6. Technology is
critical
to
educational context
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7. Eg:
 Graphics
 Finding devices
 Text layout
 Use of colour
 Informational structure
 User engagement
 Use of adjacency &
juxtaposition for
mnemonic purposes
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8. iPad + wireless + glossa
Think of aggregation as:
4 the social media of our
students’ nested lives
4 a genealogy of knowledge
where there is textura
and the development
around them of debate,
analyses (glossa) which
change in real time
4 an ethical practice
community that
develops much faster
than medieval scholarly
circles
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9. Technology
can enable
innovation
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10. legal learning
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11. LawTechCamp 11

12. how to be innovative & creative?
Useful contextual planning tool: CHAT mediational activity
(after Engerström)
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13. the CHAT framework
Eg in collaborative simulations…
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14. How to regulate…?
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15. how not to regulate…
 Debate around ABA Standard 306 (now 311), restricting
distance learning vis-à-vis classroom time:
Standard 311. DISTANCE LEARNING
Distance 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.
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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
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17. regulatory alternatives?
OER:
Institutional OER
Disciplinary OER
Pedagogic OER, eg Simshare
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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/
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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
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20. Web: paulmaharg.com
Email: paulmaharg@gmail.com
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