Resources

Draft paper accepted by JILT

Paul Maharg, Glasgow Graduate School of Law
Martin Owen, Futurelab

The full version of this paper is available to download in pdf format - see box below. On this page you'll find the paper's abstract and introduction.

Abstract

Simulation is one of the major applications of the web in entertainment and training, but has so far received little attention from HE and FE. It is becoming increasingly clear that simulations can be used for educational purposes, but how can they be used most effectively with students? How do they affect other areas of the legal curriculum? Can all professions use them equally effectively, and if so under which conditions? These and other questions are at centre of a two-year funded project, SIMPLE, which sets out to create an environment, use it within a variety of disciplines and sub-areas within law, and evaluate the results. This article describes the context of the project, sets out the ambitions of the project, and analyses the challenges facing it. It also sets the project within a larger technological context, and argues that such projects are essential not only for the future of legal education but for most professional disciplines in higher education.

Introduction

To anyone who uses the internet for more than booking plane flights there can be little doubt that there are many applications of the web that have the potential to enhance education (Bereiter 2002). One of these applications is simulation and the development of role-playing environments. There is a long history of these, in internet time, from the first early text-based instances of LAMBDA MOOs and MUDs through to the latest massively multi-user online role-playing games (MMORPGs) (Salen and Zimmerman 2004, 2006; for a relatively early - and prescient - survey in law, see Aikenhead, Widdison and Allen 1999)[1].

In education, the debate has moved on from the fundamental question as to whether such environments can be usefully deployed with students, to questions such as how one might use them most effectively, how implementations can be managed, which types of simulations are useful, and how learning gain can be maximised in the mixed media environments of most HE programmes. In disciplines such as medicine, engineering, the natural sciences, military science, international relations, business process engineering, the use of sophisticated simulations is now well established, and research literature spanning several decades has grown up that attempts to answer some of these questions (Satava 2001; Weller 2004; Rystedt and Lindwall 2004; Oswalt 1993; de Jong and van Joolingen 1998; Pidd 2002; Aldrich 2003). This article maps a number of research questions and describes one attempt to answer some of them, based on work that has been carried out at the Glasgow Graduate School of Law, University of Strathclyde.