by Karen on Sun Apr 26, 2009 11:58 pm
Hi Sarah, Joe, Robin and, of course, Deb. Glad that you made it this far! I think there are a couple of others who will be joining us soon and hopefully they will post a short introduction too.
I am Karen Barton from the University of Strathclyde Law School in Glasgow. I am the Co-director of the Legal Practice Courses which is a fancy title for saying that I manage, develop, oversee and co-ordinate our post-graduate courses on vocational legal education here at the University of Strathclyde. I also look after our 160 or so tutors (all legal practitioners who teach for a few hours a week in their area of expertise) and generally keep things ticking along with the students too! It's a busy job, and one of the reasons why we've gotten so much into simulations here at Strathclyde. We've found simulations are an amazing way to get the students practising exactly the kinds of transactions they will be carrying out for real once they leave us, and with all those tutors and around 270 students, through SIMPLE we can scale up the kinds of simulations we run, introduce variation and manage all of that relatively easily within a controlled environment.
I know some of you already use some form of paper-based simulations in your courses and others may have ideas that they want to develop into a simulation to run on the SIMPLE platform. Michael Hughes (our lead developer at Strathclyde) and I are looking forward to meeting all of you in June and to spend some time with you in workshops and one-to-one sessions so that we can help you get to that point. The idea is that by the end of the workshops in Boulder, everyone will go away with at least one blueprint for their simulation developed and ready to launch in SIMPLE. But that means we have a little bit of preparatory work to do before we get there...
So, I am going to add a new topic thread to the main SIMPLE@CALI forum and I'd like you all to add a post there describing the simulation you want to develop for the SIMPLE platform. We'll just start with a basic description of your simulation in your own words for the moment. Make it as brief or as detailed as you like. Some of you may have quite well developed ideas while others will be the stage of wondering whether the idea they have will actually be feasible! That is all good stuff, and don't worry if you haven't thought it all out yet, as hopefully the next few weeks will take you through that process.
Once everyone has posted their idea we'll start the process of refining your simulation into a more structured format and introducing some of the terminology and vocabulary that we use in the SIMPLE environment to describe the various important aspects of the simulation itself so that when we get to Boulder we should all be at a stage where we can start using the software and building our blueprints.
I look forward to seeing all of your ideas and working with you over these next few weeks!
Karen