14th Annual BILETA Conference - CYBERSPACE 1999: Crime, Criminal Justice and the Internet

Recent initiatives in, and reports on, university teaching, learning and assessment have emphasised the need for disciplines to be aware of their own educational practice. Law is no exception in this regard, and many of the current initiatives in legal learning set out to achieve this goal in various ways. In this paper I shall argue that disciplinary awareness is not enough: the activity of teaching the law is unavoidably an interdisciplinary endeavour, both for us and our students. If we are to consider our students' learning seriously, we require to engage with the theoretical constructs of other disciplines, some of which have much to tell us about how we teach law, how we might teach it more effectively; how our students learn and what they understand as the learning process. This interdisciplinary understanding is an essential component in the dialectic between theory and praxis of learning, and the law. And if this is true for what might be termed more traditional learning methods, it is even more the case for computer-based methods of teaching and learning. In CBL, the management of learning on many levels becomes critical to educational success, and the understanding and application of interdisciplinary theory plays an important role in the development of materials and in the learning events themselves.