Prometheus, Sisyphus, Themis: three rival futures for legal

education

Paul Maharg

He had been told that when looking for a goodoracle it was best to find the oracle that otheroracles went to, but he was shut. There was a signby the entrance saying, ‘I just don’t know anymore. Try next door, but that’s just a suggestion,not formal oracular advice’.

Adams, D. (1993). Mostly Harmless. Pan Macmillan, London, 73

(Slides @ http://paulmaharg.com/slides)

preview

1. The two David Hamiltons: Interdisciplinary historical understanding and the trading zone

2. Techne, forgetfulness and the future

– Glosses and webcasts

– Digital technologies

3. Three rival futures of legal education research: Prometheus, Sisyphus, Themis

Slides @ http://paulmaharg.com/slides

Professor Paul Maharg | CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 CANADA 1

The two David Hamiltons:Interdisciplinary historical understanding and

the trading zone

Towards a Theory of Schooling, eg 1

• Historical investigation of concepts such as ‘class’, ‘course’, ‘curriculum’ via intellectual genealogy, eg

– Class: from the University of Paris’ new Modus et Ordo Parisiensis (early 16th century) describing ‘sub-division of schools’ with ‘individualized pupil-by-pupil instruction’ (Hamilton, 7)

– It can refer either to sequence (eg of knowledge) or coherence (eg an ordered society) and re the second, see the new schools founded and patronized by mercantile classes, to providea new knowledge for specialist mercantile activities, not church administration,and overseen by them.

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Towards a Theory of Schooling, eg 2

• Curriculum – first used in English in 17th

century records of University of Glasgow, in 1633 (OED) (Hamilton, 3). Context:

• introduced by Andrew Melville to create a specifically Calvinist mode of learning

• Used Ramist techniques of highly formalized teaching, with a knowledge plan that was rigid

• ‘the “whole life” of each student was to be rendered open to teacher supervision’ (Hamilton, 49)

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Towards a Theory of Schooling, eg 2

‘First came the introduction of class divisions and closer pupil surveillance; and second came the refinement of pedagogic content and methods. The net result, however, was cumulative: teaching and learning became, for good or ill, more open to external scrutiny and control.’

(Hamilton 49)

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Towards a Theory of Schooling, eg 3• Classroom – first used in the context of Adam

Smith’s professorial lectures in Glasgow University, including jurisprudence (1752-64)

• In education, Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments is influential, where sympathy is an ethical & social bond (cf Francis Hutcheson’s concept of the moral sense faculty, akin to an aesthetic sense)

• Further developed by educators in and around Glasgow – David Stow, Robert Owen.

• A pedagogy was developed around sympathy and emulation (as self-esteem and self-improvement), not emulation and competition (as rivalry and conflict) Professor Paul Maharg | CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 CANADA 6

Results…

‘Slowly I began to appreciate that the weak sense of history shown by classroom researchers was matched only by the weak sense of the classroom shown by educational historians.’

(Hamilton, 2)

• Hamilton’s meticulous historical discourse analysis draws on generations of bibliographies into medieval, Renaissance, modern universities – historical and educational.

• His work is an example of Peter Galison’s trading zone, where multi-disciplines come together to work on a project

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Techne, forgetfulness and the future

Can you remember your first mobile phone?

Professor Paul Maharg | CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 CANADA 9

My first step into

mobile comms –

but can’t remember

what it did, apart

from make calls…

Fortunately there are

mobile phone

chroniclers…

see:

http://www.lokety.com/t28faq.html#t015

https://ericssoners.wordpress.com/2014/10/26/t28/

manuscript writing: the early context, pre-12th century

1. Materials– Wax tablets– Tally sticks– Paper– Parchment or vellum

2. Forms of writing– Different hands, thickness of line,

height of letters– Early medieval scripts included scriptio continua –

– theexperiencewasratherlikereadingthisnottoodifficultthougheasierifyoutryreadingunderyourbreathalsocalledsubvocalisationwhichiswhatalotofscribestendedtodowhenreadingandwritingandofcoursenomodernpunctuation

3. Punctuation– Marks were used at different heights in lines, eg ‘diple’

or arrowhead (for quoting scripture), hedera or ivy leaf for start of quotations, and 7-shaped mark (end of section)

Cod

ex S

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htt

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5

the 13th centuryscholarly text

• Writers used alphabetisation,arabic numerals, chapter divisions,rubrics, capitals, paraph marks,running titles

• Used compilatio – compilation ofextracts of works of authorityor auctoritas, chosen byhierarchies of compilators

‘The late medieval book differs more from its early medieval predecessors than it does from the printed books of our own day. The scholarly apparatus which we take for granted – analytical table of contents, text disposed into books, chapters, and paragraphs, and accompanied by footnotes and index --originated in the applications of the notions of ordinatio and compilatio by writers, scribes, and the rubricators of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.’ (Parkes 1976, 66)

glossators were intermediaries…

• Major scholarly industry

• Helped law students & professional lawyersnavigate informational overload

• Used collaboration to scale, collaborativefiltering, recommender system, used bookmarking and scholarly folksonomies

• Sophistication of reader means that intermediaries may be preferred at first; but as expertise grows, mediation is needed less. But:

– glosses are fluid: later, more sophisticatedarguments replace earlier

– interface design shapes learning

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1317.8.17 Professor Paul Maharg | CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 CANADA

‘Aesthetics matter:interface design shapes learning’

Maharg (2007), chapter 9.

webcast v.1

http

s://o

nlin

ete

achin

gm

anife

sto

.word

pre

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com

/

14Professor Paul Maharg | CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 CANADA

webcast v.2

15Professor Paul Maharg | CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 CANADA

webcast v.3

recovering the past

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1. Coherence

2. Signalling

3. Redundancy

4. Spatial contiguity

5. Temporal contiguity

-- Richard E. Mayer’s multimedia principles (2009)

we forget how powerful, invisible protocols shape our digital interface

• TCP/IP (Kahn & Cerf, 1970s)

• WWW (Berners-Lee, 1980s)

• Peer-to-peer (decentralised, sharing cultures, social media, 1990s, 2000s)

• Blockchain (decentralised ledgers, where entries arepermanent, transparent, searchable, and can store asset transactions, smart contracts, digital signatures and certificates)See Blockchain in Educationhttp://bit.ly/2zIdfMk

See also 10 ways Blockchain could be used ineducation: http://bit.ly/2kmaFsV

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possible futures…

• Quality of digital content essential, more convergence in platforms; campus becomes a learning platform

• A return beyond the book to a manuscript culture. But immensely faster, more complex, with its own hierarchies of knowledge and power.

• Distance and intimacy will be redefined; ownership and identity defined

• More need for Open: OAccess, OResearch, OPlatforms, remixing tools and cultures

• Increased threat to academic independence from corporate providers, eg publishers:

– Cost of journal subscriptions – see http://bit.ly/2mNFxRv

– Corporate capture of our learning / teaching systems

• Analytics will matter more and will re-code what we do

• Bots and exo-cortices will facilitate collaborative learning online 18

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But we have no disciplinary memory of our technology in legal education…

• There are no histories, one bibliography (Goldman, 2008), no collective statements, no policy papers, no map of interdisciplinary collaborations, no meta-reviews, few discourse analyses of the field (none updated). In the UK, three BILETA Reports (1991, 1996, 2004). One systematic review:

Maharg, P., Nicol, E. (2014). Simulation and technology in legal education: a systematic review and future research programme. In Grimes, R., Phillips, E., Strevens, C. (eds), Legal Education: Simulation in Theory and Practice, Ashgate Publishing, Emerging Legal Education series, 17-42.

Also true of legal education, legal services and the profession

• LETR (2013)reported on poor or non-existent data, research that was not sufficiently robust in methods –same holds true for many jurisdictions

• For LETR we collected over 2,000 references online, but not updated by regulators

• Recently, the IBA President’s Taskforce on the Future of Legal Services attempted a survey of the field of technology and legal services – but again, one-shot research

• No sustained, longitudinal effort to map the field, create taxonomies, tag-structures, etc

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Three rival futuresof legal education research:

Prometheus, Sisyphus, Themis

Compare how others organise their research, eg medical education…

The example of AMEE (Association of Medical Educators in Europe)

– BEME – Best Evidence in Medical Education

– ESME – Essential Skills in Medical Education

– MedEdWorld – information about medical education

– AMEE Guides

– AMEE Translations

– BEME Guides

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How could we start to emulate?

1. Map the field & create taxonomies for research data

2. Organise systematic data collection on law school stats, eg across entry/exit points, across jurisdictions (eg using Big Data Project methods)

3. Focus on studies on learning, and longitudinal data

4. Provide meta-reviews and systematic summaries of research, where appropriate; literature guides; commentaries; policy papers.

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Prometheus, Sisyphus, Themis?

• Prometheus – brilliant, creative, experimentalist, counter-cultural and suffers for it – Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound

• Sisyphus – condemned to roll a boulder endlessly uphill – Robert Garioch’s Sisyphus, or Carol Ann Duffy’s Mrs Sisyphus

• Themis -- goddess of right order, through Eunomia, fair law, Dike, justice, Eirene, peace, mother of the Hours, prophetess at Delphi

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Themis project• An online space for collaborative, cross-disciplinary, inter-

jurisdictional research into legal education and the profession:

– Original research and meta-analysis on, eg

• the changing profession/market for legal services

• developments and best practices in legal education and training

– Synthesis: consequences for LET of regulatory/organisational/technological change in legal services

– Databanking for evidence-based policy-making

• Resources and training:

– Working Paper Series

– Systematic Reviews Series

– Methods Series

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ReferencesGoldman, P. (2008). Legal education and technology II: An annotated

bibliography. Law Library Journal, 100, 3, 415-528.

Hamilton, D. (1989). Towards a Theory of Schooling. Falmer Press, Lewes, East Sussex. Reprinted 2013, Routledge, Oxon.

Maharg, P. (2007). Transforming Legal Education: Learning and Teaching the Law in the Early Twenty-First Century. Routledge, London.

Mayer, R. E. (2009). Multimedia learning (2nd ed). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Parkes, M.B. (1976), The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book, in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to R.W. Hunt, edited by J.J.G. Alexander and M.T. Gibson, Oxford University Press

Webb, J., Ching, J., Maharg, P., Sherr, A. (2013). Setting Standards. The Future of Legal Services Education and Training Regulation in England and Wales. SRA, BSB, IPS

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Email: pmaharg@osgoode.yorku.caWeb: paulmaharg.comSlides: paulmaharg.com/slides