After 11 years at Strathclyde Law School, I've moved post, to Northumbria Law School, Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne. Dean Philip Plowden's offer to get involved with the great initiatives they have there, including the Student Law Office (a superbly-run student clinic handling hundreds of cases a year) was irresistible.

Karen, Michael and Paul are currently at the Franklin Pierce Law Center, in Concord, New Hampshire, working with John Garvey and others on SIMPLE. Karen and I have already worked with Franklin Pierce on the use of Standardized Clients in the training and assessment of students in interviewing.

SIMPLE was awarded the prize for Innovation in e-Assessment at the JISC E-Assessment Scotland Conference held last week in Dundee. The e-Assessment Competition attracted 28 entries from all over Scotland, including schools, further education colleges and universities. According to e-Assessment Scotland, the Innovation award highlights ‘an example of best practice in e-Assessment, which clearly demonstrates the full potential of the technology and its practical application.’ I was present to accept the award on behalf of the SIMPLE project team.

Cyberdam is our sister project in the Netherlands. With a substantial grant from the Dutch government, it has developed in very interesting directions -- see for example Cyberdam 3D. On Thursday I'm giving a workshop on SIMPLE to the Cyberdam conference in den Haag. Looking forward to seeing the Dutch projects that they've been working on for the past two years, and swapping ideas about the future of European sim environments such as ours.

Karen Counsel and Viv Picton from the Law School, Glamorgan U., visited us today and spent the morning with Michael. Karen's work with SIMPLE at Glamorgan has been outstanding, both in undergraduate and postgraduate law programmes. She is pushing the envelope of SIMPLE's functionality, and creating sims that have, in one first-year LLB programme, resulted in at least a 10% overall average increase in examination marks, as well as improved retention figures. Karen will be publishing the results of her experiences with SIMPLE -- watch this space for news of publication.

Interesting story from Quest to Learn, via Seb Schmoller. A newly opened state-funded 12 to 18 school in New York that will rely entirely on games-based learning.

We're currently in the middle of SIMPLE training -- two days of intensive work on creating scenarios, drafting blueprints, packing & deploying blueprints. We have representatives from Caledonian, Cumbria and The Robert Gordon University. Much of the information about sim creation is already on this site, but nothing beats sitting down and talking about sim design and implementation. It's an entirely new field for most folk, and you can learn so much about the culture and implementation by discussing the approach with folk who have gone through the process of design and implementation.

Michael and I were at Plymouth Law School today giving a day seminar on things SIMPLE. We were with a small and enthusiastic bunch of staff who were eager to get hands-on experience of working with the SIMPLE tools.

This is *really* exciting. This is a first look at SIMPLE Tools 2!

Please note this is a VERY early release and there are still a lot of things to be done, and performance to be improved.

Also there is no audio, and apologies for the quality, it was captured on a virtual machine so its a little ropey. Hopefully we'll be able to do a refresh of this in the future with a proper voice over etc.

So check it out