Maharg: Emergent educational designs and distributed autonomous organisations

Professor Dr. Paul Maharg of Australian National University has posted Emergent educational designs and distributed autonomous organisations .

The post begins by commenting on Professor Kate Galloway’s earlier post on technology in legal education.

Here are excerpts from Professor Maharg’s post:

[...] The nature of how we teach will change radically; and how will affect what. Problem-based learning, simulation, clinic are (to quote Lee Shulman) the shadow pedagogies that are slowly emerging from the shadows. But behind them, waiting to emerge, hand-in-hand with digital technologies, are even more shadowy, much more powerfully technologized and personal curriculum designs, which we need to understand and adapt.

What are these shadowy pedagogies? See for instance Eris – a platform for distributed autonomous organizations (DAOs) that use Ethereum blockchain technologies. [...] In the WG Hart presentation a few days ago I summarised some of the uses of this open technology [...] In legal education, a blockchained environment might include learning objects, a comms system, a badge system (eg Mozilla Badges), a payment system, access to knowledge and skills environments and other decentralised functions. Decentralisation — what’s the role of the LMS then? I’d guess that we’re already moving away from it, and blockchained legal education will probably render it unwieldy, pointless.

More fundamentally, and given disintermediation, what does this do to the nature, role and status of the law school as educational institution? And how should this be regulated? We have papers on Bitcoin regulation to use as a model, but we need much more imaginative thinking, and we need to do that with regulators, as I argued at the WG Hart Workshop, and bring them with us in our thinking. Above all, we need to do it for ourselves and our students, so that we can greet the technologies as they emerge from the shadows, and draw them into the endless educational conversation, glancing awhile at the figures behind them, waiting their turn to emerge into the light.

For more details, please see the complete post.

Filed under: Applications, Others' scholarly or sophisticated blogposts, Policy debates, Slides, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Blockchain technology and legal education, Distributed autonomous organizations, Eris, Ethereum, Kate Galloway, Law school technology, Legal applications of blockchain technology, Legal education and blockchain technology, Legal educational technology, Legal instructional technology, Paul Maharg, Technology in legal education, W. G. Hart Workshop, W. G. Hart Workshop 2014



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