The University of Kent has recently launched its brand new Centre for Child Protection, which they launched in London today at the London Art House, in Islington, and which is a centre at the University of  Kent offering training programmes for professionals who work within the field of child protection, which the university claims is the first of its kind.

Whilst we’re not sure about this claim (there is a Centre for Child Protection at the University of South Australia offering similar programmes, and which also seeks to identify best practice and help prevent child abuse and another one in Canada doing the same work), the centre is an innovative and creative place, which is at the forefront of technology and research.

The Centre for Child Protection, as we discovered listening to Professor Shemmings and Dr Reeves, who head up the Centre, is primarily a Masters training programme (MA) for busy professionals, and is a distance-learning course which is designed to be accessed on-line in a flexible way to fit around work and for all practitioners who are interested in learning more about child protection, from social workers, to lawyers, the police force and beyond.

The afternoon featured several keynote speakers, which included Professor Dame Julia Goodfellow, the Vice Chancellor at the University of Kent and Fiona Harrow, the Deputy Director of the Child Protection and Safeguarding Division at the Department of Education.

Fiona Harrow talked about the Department’s interest in child protection, its concerns over the issue of neglect and desire to focus on neglect thresholds, how they are met and the variations across the country. She spoke about the department’s focus on ensuring that when mistakes are made inside the system, those mistakes are not buried but addressed and learned from, without getting entrenched in the culture of blame. Fiona also mentioned that the Department was going to be funding courses on how to carry out serious case reviews, which they hoped would become part of a more transparent approach.

Dr Shemmings then spoke about the Centre and explained that it had drawn from a broad range of resources, so that the centre could offer not only an academic and research based environment but a practical one too, so that it combined research and professional experience to give students a real feel for working in the area of child protection. He also spoke about the need to be more child-focused in practice and to avoid compassion fatigue, which can come about when professionals who work in stressful environments start to view their practice negatively and can lead to health problems as well as dangerously reduced levels of competence.

Professor Shemmings then went on to say that various aspects of the programme had been influenced by Donald Forrester.

Dr Jane Reeves then spoke about the programme and told us that the virtual game used for the training course called Rosie, was heavily influenced by the work of Dr Harry Ferguson, and that the free prototype (which we played), called Rosie 1, had been downloaded 2,500 times and each download has a feedback portion attached, so they were able to take on board several suggestions and evolve the virtual game to reflect those suggestions.

Whilst the course was very well thought out and had clearly been well invested, with a great deal of financial assistance in place to ensure that the distance learning course is cutting edge, our interest in attending the launch was  related to a progressive virtual game the university had created, for social workers, called Rosie and which is the centrepiece for their training programme. We wanted to find out whether Rosie had evolved since the last time we saw her (although, technically, we never got to see Rosie in the first game).

Rosie, which is described as a Serious Game (a game used for educational purposes rather than for pure entertainment), is a virtual role play scenario which allows students to enter a virtual home where a child, Rosie, is possibly at risk and to interact with the characters (family members) as a social worker might. There is a health worker and a social worker in the newer version of Rosie (called Rosie 2) and the game is a combination of interactive decision-making and reflective assessment. In this version, Rosie is five years older, so she is nine. (In the first version, Rosie was four).

Rosie 2 features nine-year old Rosie, whom we do get to meet and speak to this time, and the theme for this version of the game is neglect. Dr Reeves went on to explain the difficulties in defining neglect and the many variations and thresholds for the term itself, which fluctuates widely across the country. Rosie 2 has thirteen scenes and is based on research involving  experts from various fields, not just the professors at the university.

Dr Reeves went to on to say that the social worker in the game is not ‘programmed’ to use models of best practice throughout, in other words, he is not always acting or responding to his environment at the highest professional level, but at an adequate one, which, Dr Reeves explained, was designed to encourage students to interact and offer feedback to the professors, so that ideas could be explored. We were not sure why the programme wanted to seek feedback from the students in this way (notwithstanding the desire to test their knowledge and natural instincts), given that many will be new to the field of child protection, so we asked Dr Reeves and Professor Shemmings if it was possible to have access to the best way of responding to a situation within the game itself and the short answer was no. This did concern us, although Dr Reeves went on to explain that the surrounding material on the course would help to bolster the playing of the game.

The answer still left us wondering why models of best practice were not added as a supplementary feature and where in fact students could access such models on the course, especially as some students may not be able to improve on the scenarios and responses given by the social worker in the game, and some of the standard responses are still, to our mind, lacking in sensitivity – in one scene, we see the social worker ask Rosie if she feels sad. When she replies yes, the social worker moves on to talk about the possible abuser in the scenario after asking Rosie to hold off giving more detail. To our mind, that kind of response decreases trust rather than builds it – all the child hears is “I’m asking you a question about yourself, but I’m not genuinely interested”.  This was not the only feature that concerned us, though.

There was still an issue with the tone being used by both the social worker and the health visitor when speaking to the family members; it was dictatorial and heavy-handed and, we felt, highlighted why families, who may indeed need help and support, sometimes ‘retaliate’ against social workers who speak this way; it only serves to reduce trust and cause conflict. This worried us, a lot. And whist the social worker’s tone when speaking with Rosie was much softer and kinder, some of the ways in which questions were asked seemed a little too crude to be viewed as part of a truly competent performance. And as Rosie is nine in this version of the game, we were also unsure about the age-appropriate nature of the games the social worker asks Rosie herself to engage in – drawing faces for family members to describe emotions (indirect approaches to eliciting information, as we understand it) and then asking Rosie to colour them in at the end (which seemed so odd to us, given that these family members were not providing a loving, protective environment for Rosie – surely asking her to colour the faces in would be emotionally uncomfortable)?

This brings us to the technical content of the game itself. It’s incredibly hard and seriously expensive to make a virtual game fluid, seamless and flexible, so to be fair to the university the latest version of Rosie is, under the circumstances, a bold attempt at trying to create something new. The problem is, in order to get the kind of sophisticated nuance and responses in a game of this nature, the graphics and the scenarios do need to be ‘gaming style’ good and on that point, all we would say, is that we hope the Centre will invest a little more of the generous funding it receives to develop Rosie in the way it deserves to be developed.

Dr Reeves and Professor Shemmings did say that Rosie is not intended to be a stand-alone learning tool; it is intended to fit into the extensive and very thorough training programme on offer at the university, but we saw no sign of real-life role play, using actors to give students a ‘live’ feel of what it’s like going into a scenario like the one in Rosie 2, which we feel is a very necessary stepping stone in the virtual game’s evolution and indeed in the programme’s evolution as a whole.

We are sure that after reading this post, if they do at all, Professor Shemmings and Dr Reeves will rue the day they invited us, but we are not child protection experts; there are many things we have not learned about the field and we may well have made errors of judgement in our summing up of Rosie 2, and more than this, we do not want the Centre to fail, we want it to succeed and our hope is that social work will be done by those with a passion for family, in whatever shape or size they find them, and a mad-crazy love of kids. We’re just not sure that Rosie 2 is going to be able to make the impact that’s needed. But perhaps Rosie 3 will.

We would like to thank Professor Shemmings and Dr Reeves for inviting us to the launch; it was incredibly gracious of them and we genuinely wish them every success with the Centre and hope it is the start of a movement to make things better.

Stats and Facts for the Centre for Child Protection:

The Centre for Child Protection

Cost of the course: £3,700.00 per annum

Rosie 2 

Rosie 2 Packages

Serious Games Institute

PS Why do child protection experts call families, ‘clients’? What’s up with that…… can’t we just call them families……

It’s a dirty confession, some might say an open declaration of war on the very words that shaped our world, maybe even a violation of the verb and vernacular, but, this week, I took delivery of a Kindle.

It’s a strange thing to have done in some ways, as I’ve always thought of the Kindle as a stepping stone in the technology world, a little like the Mini Disc phenomenon (remember those?), just a caesura in the world of words on screens, waiting to be incorporated into tablets and iphone apps, but curiosity got the better of me. And I had a birthday coming up.

So why not just buy a book? Amongst avid readers, there is a strong desire to protect the Old Ways. Some might view this as elitism, but to do so would be a mistake. Book lovers don’t just read books, they surrender to them, both physically and emotionally and they get attached, from cover to conclusion. As a very sweet friend of mine on Twitter explained last night, as we were discussing this very thing, “Nothing beats real books. Especially old ones by the Old Ones. Nothing…. Kindle Bogus. I love the smell of musty books in the morning. Smells like ‘Victory’ by Joseph Conrad”.  Inevitably, what the Kindle does, is remove some of that familiarity to the reading process, which in turn makes it seem like an enemy in our midst, an imposter even. I understand that, because I too, am in love with books. And the Kindle presents a threat to my reading experience, an experience shared by my generation and the ones that came before it.

So why on earth get one? Whenever Kindles came up in conversation, my reaction to it was always the same: a mixture of deep curiosity and, I admit, a little disdain. How could something plastic take the place of my breathing books? How could the Kindle really measure up to the feel and flavour of my much-loved paper backs and hard backs? And was this new digital way to read, just one more step towards a cold, callous world, where emotion and appreciation of the human condition become less and less important and in turn, lead us to the ultimate and inevitable destruction of the universe? (This may seem a little dramatic, but I’m in the middle of reading Mountains of Madness and it’s rubbed off on me a little).

Enter the Kindle Touch. As soon as I received it, I wanted to try it, put it through its paces, find all its shortfalls and get to grips with its glory and sure enough there are plenty of shortfalls to write home about. For a start, it’s plastic. Anyone who loves the feel of paper in their hands, the reassuringly solid bend and sway of the book will notice the contrast of this cold, immovable material. But Kindle have thought of that. The range of covers for the Kindle, soften the feel of the gadget and to be fair, hardbacks have a very similar feel anyway. The Kindle is different, but it’s not worlds away from what we know already.

Another issue lies with the technology – it’s just not smooth enough. You ‘turn’ a page and the whole screen squints at you, as if you’ve woken it up from a bad dream. The awkward jolts take getting used to. For all its technology, the old fashioned book is still more sophisticated in this respect. And this is what the avid reader is watching out for. Holding on to books, is not just about holding on to old ways not easily relinquished. It is also about making sure we don’t let go of what is still the most efficient and the most advanced way of doing something and here, the Kindle falls short.

As a piece of software though, it starts to come into its own. The Kindle Touch allows you to look up words with a dictionary they’ve installed for you for free (you can choose from an American or an English dictionary), it allows you to search for words in a book, it will bookmark your page for you without you having to do anything, so that when you turn it back on, there you are, at the place you left off. It will also allow you to highlight text, make notes, read others’ notes if they’re available and even tells you how far through the book you are in percentage terms as you turn the pages. And rather brilliantly, it uses location as well as page numbers to help you find passages. The location tracker is a clever device – given that kindles vary in physical size, finding a page can be confusing, as your page 52 may be another’s page 89. So, location works on a more sophisticated tack – it will ‘locate’ the segment you’re reading, like a universal coordinate, so you can share it with others. You can even ‘loan’ your books to kindle buddies for a few days at a time, although you cannot read that book whilst it is on loan.

Yet even the software has its glitches. Despite buying a Kindle which is up to date with its software (and much like a pc you need to download updates every now and then), my Kindle Touch refuses to let me buy my books straight from the Kindle, as it insists that I need to update (which I don’t, having checked its spec, as per the guide, which is also conveniently loaded onto your Kindle). This means I will have to call up the help line, eventually. For the time being though, I’m enjoying buying books for as little as 70 pence from Amazon and watching it download at lightning speed onto my kindle.

But all the pros and cons got me thinking. Was I right to view the kindle as an intruder? Was it really part of a cycle of destruction in our species’ psyche or was it simply the future? I wondered how quill users must have felt when the pen made its debut. Did they too find fault with the future or did they embrace its offerings? Like my sweet friend, many of us have viewed paper books as ‘real books’ for such a long time, but are they really any more real than the books we read on laptops and gadgets like the kindle? Another kind friend who took part in the Kindle conversation on Twitter said “Nothing compares to the smell of old read pages of a cherished book”, a sentiment I share deeply, but unless we spill wine or perfume on these books, or travel with them, those imprints are emotional acts of worship to the written word. And we can worship that way, whether in print or in plastic.

This is something that must have occurred to Amazon’s CEO and founder, Jeff Bezos and he uses that same thought to market the Kindle. And it’s nothing short of genius. When you first start up your kindle, you receive a message in the form of a letter from Jeff. In this letter, he sets the tone for using the kindle. It’s a deft manoeuvre and one that certainly got us thinking, because in the letter he writes this rather magical sentence, “Our top objective was for Kindle to disappear into your hands – to get out of the way – so you can enjoy your reading. We hope you’ll quickly forget you’re reading on an advanced wireless device and instead be transported into that mental realm readers love, where the outside world dissolves, leaving only the author’s stories, words and ideas”.

Amazon’s Founder not only understood that he was reaching out to a tough audience, one that ultimately rates old-fashioned functionality over flash, but that in order to win them over, he would have to approach them quietly, with understated earnest. There are many ways he does that, including the astutely named whispernet, which is the name given to the kindle download process. But he also understood that he would have to play to their sense of imagination, too. And that is exactly what he does in that sentence, by placing the kindle subserviently into the hands of his consumers, asking them to ignore the product completely (whilst making sure to identify its strengths as a state of the art device) and to focus on what attracted them to the paper book in the first place – the story itself.

And that is where the genius of the Kindle lies. We read not because we want to hold the book, we hold the book, first of all, because we want to read. I am already attached to my kindle and it has only been with me for 24 hours.  Having feared that it might ruin the reading experience or wear away at the integrity of the authors whom I’m reading on it, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the way the Kindle has carved a place in my life and in my heart. A little of that fear remains – although I can’t explain what my concerns are at this point, but perhaps I’m slowly letting go of something which may allow me to step into the future, without forgetting those reading roots that planted in me a desire to read and to see the world in words.

It won’t byte…..

This evening, armed with a pair of binoculars and a wobbly telescope my son and I went to his school to do a bit of star-gazing and in what could only be  a delicious cliché, we came back completely starry-eyed…..

The Herschel Astronomical Society was set up for keen amateur enthusiasts of astronomy to meet and share their mutual interest in the stars. Named after Sir William Herschel, the astronomer who, on 13 March 1781, using a telescope he had made himself, discovered the planet Uranus, the society organises meetings and events at Eton College for anyone interested in learning more about astronomy.

The society has its own observatory with two ginormous telescopes (which we got to use and which were so powerful we could see Buzz Lightyear brushing his teeth on the moon), and they offer what they call Public Viewing Sessions, where the society will either invite children to their observatory or come to schools with their telescopes with a view to promoting astronomy. My son’s school had invited the society to come to the school itself and so we all arrived at the main building at 6.30pm, in the dark with our gazing gear. As we were ushered into the school, tables inside were piled high with little booklets, each entitled “Star Guide for 2012” which had been prepared by the BBC and Open University. The booklets offered really great, practical tips on what kind of things were good to take with you on a star spotting mission and which stars you could expect to see throughout the year.

Stargazing Live: A guide to the stars in 2012

Little people love going out at night, so the fact that you have to wait until it’s dark to see the stars makes the evening feel very magical and it was lots of fun, too. A big projector screen had been put in the main hall and as we watched the screen, we could see all the stars that were out near the school.The images were amazing and then we discovered that the software being used was actually a free download from the internet.

Stellarium is a free open source planetarium which you can download onto your computer and it’s seriously cool.  With over 600,000 stars to look at, a powerful zoom tool and even constellation set ups to view, this software is impressive and very life-like.

Stellarium at work: The constellations with images

Once we had been briefed about what we might see in the night sky (and as the sky was clear, we were in for a treat – Venus, Jupiter and the moon were all up and shining brightly), we walked to the school garden and were greeted by several large telescopes, with tracking equipment, locked on to various planets and stars ready for us to take a peep at.

The gentlemen who came from the Herschell Astronomical Society were passionate about astronomy and were very informative and brilliant to listen to. When I asked if I could try to take a photo of the moon from one of their telescopes, they were incredibly kind and allowed me to do so. I nearly fainted with excitement, but that is another story for another day.

Photo of the moon, captured from inside a telescope using a mobile phone camera

We stayed outside for an hour and a half, gazing into all the telescopes, trying to find Orion’s Belt, ooh-ing and aaaah-ing at Jupiter’s moons and wowing at Venus, who slipped away first, leaving Jupiter and the moon behind. Then, the cloud began to set in and suddenly everyone could feel the cold creeping under their jackets and gloves.

As events for children go, this one has to count as one of the best we’ve ever experienced. It was in the dark – you can’t beat the dark for excitement where little people are concerned (and big people aren’t much better) and it offered the chance to see something unusual and fantastical. Kids are naturally curious and the sky is an endless source of fascination for them, a place which takes centre stage in fairy tales and where wishes come true. Stars are the stuff dreams are made of and the Herschel Society’s hands-on evening was truly enchanting.

If a little person comes away from an educational experience having learned something but not realising that they have, you know you’ve done a great job. That’s exactly what the Herschel Society delivered this evening and we can’t recommend their star-gazing extravaganza enough. A stellar ten out of ten for a spectacular production.

For more images from the Herschel Society, click on the photo above

For a first crush, Roald Dahl’s Matilda is hard to beat. A super sweet sweetheart with a super brain to match, her cleverness and her compassion combined with her naughty streak make Matilda the ultimate pin-up for every cowboy and Indian. She was certainly my son’s first on-screen love and the film version with Mara Wilson is more than well-worn in our house. Yet her brilliance could not have existed had Roald Dahl not breathed life into her and so it is always with some doubt that we expose ourselves to remakes of timeless classics. But for anyone going to watch the Royal Shakespeare Company’s version of this miraculous story, that doubt would be misplaced.

Having bought our tickets, we accidentally found ourselves going on opening night as the show had been postponed for a week, so we were not sure what to expect – pitch perfect performances or the start of something in need of serious tweaking. What we found, was breath-taking. Everything about this production is flawless.

The set itself was ingeniously put together and worked like a liquid landscape, with just the right amount of change and props so that every part of the story came to life. The lighting too was well thought out and used sometimes to spine-chilling effect. The music was also a triumph; the songs were beautifully written and varied nicely in style to fit in with each scene.The Smell of Rebellion and Revolting Children contain songs which will stick to the tapping soles of your feet and slowly melt into your mind. If you don’t wake up the following morning with a dewy glow about you, I will put you in Chokey myself. And that is the kind of emotion this performance will make you feel. But it’s not just the set and the songs that create that kind of excitement; there is an altogether much more powerful magic that sets this production on fire: the actors.

There are lots of child actors in this production – as you might imagine, and each one is a miracle. For a full-bodied show which runs to around two hours, the stamina these little people display is inspiring.  Their performances are fantastic, too; synchronised and smiley, every single one brings a special warmth to the show. Matilda herself was convincing and elegant as the young heroine quietly making her way through childhood one book at a time (not to mention the odd mischievous deed). A very sweet Eric adds more than a touch of ‘cute’, whilst Nigel added a delightful dollop of ‘dude’ to the mini ensemble and Lavender rounds off the kids with her quirky devotion to Matilda and her well-timed comedic come-backs. And the adults too, played their part. Very, very well.

Miss Honey was endearing and deliciously wistful as she struggled to find herself and to save Matilda from her disinterested parents. The Wormwoods were suitably brash and unwelcoming but likeable too and the ever lovely Mrs Phelps was ever-lovely as the caring and fascinated librarian who nurtures Matilda’s love of learning.

Yet the most powerful performance, the most brilliant re-creation of the evening, must go to Bertie Carvel – the gentleman,yes, gentleman, who took the role of Miss Trunchbull. The sheer genius of this performance is hard to put into words, but I’m going to try. His portrayal of the evil headmistress, riddled with angst and a deep fear of what lies beyond the safe world of rules and regulations, is nuanced and sophisticated. His posture as the conflicted Miss Trunchbull alone is masterful, from her twisted hands to that sunken head which twitches smoothly with gelid disgust as she makes her way through the scores of children she comes across, picking them off one by one to punish them at every opportunity. That voice too, soft and yet menacing will have you on the edge of your seat and yet perhaps the most intensely satisfying aspect of Mr Carvel’s impersonation is his ability to convey the fearful with the downright hilarious. Credit should also go to the fantastic costume designers for the enhancement of the characters’ personalities and MissTrunchbull’s outfits really do add to the menace and the absurdity that is the Headmistress of Crunchem Hall, but it is Mr Carvel who takes it home, with his wry and astute recreation of Dahl’s monster.

The director too, stays true to Roald Dahl’s narrative, remaining as loyal as is humanly possible within the restrictions that a theatrical production naturally imposes and the dance routines too, which were out of this world, seemed faithful in their own way. It was obvious that the children in the production were well looked after too; at one point during the second half a prop mal-functioned and technicians arrived on stage to move the children away from harm (it was only a very small malfunction). They were reassured and then redirected to perform the end of the scene without the props. Nobody minded that a minor glitch (pardon the pun) had taken place. We were all too entranced by the perfection of the play and its players.

Going to the theatre today is not cheap; I was very lucky tobe able to go with my son but if you can make it to the Cambridge Theatre to see Matilda, it may just be the best thing you did this half term or any half term in the history of half terms; I gave it a standing ovation last night – along with every other member of the audience.

Miss Trunchbull is waiting for you – it’s phys ed or bust.

In today’s terribly crowded self-help market, it can be hard to find something genuinely worth picking up off the shelf and taking home and although the book’s title suggests it is aimed at those divorcing in their forties and fifties, the advice spans all age groups and in this way does itself a dis-service.  For Jim Duzak’s book, which focuses on making the most of what we have, whether it’s a mature marriage or a new start is that rarest of things: advice that’s worth reading.

But it’s not for the faint of heart. The Attorney at Love, as he is known in America, doesn’t mess around. His message is clear: in order to have an adventure worth having, we must first be honest with ourselves and then we must will ourselves into action. Yet that is not the only controversial thing about this self-help book, as we discovered when we read it.

The Attorney at Love has a great deal of experience both on a personal level and a professional level when it comes to relationships, having been a divorce lawyer and mediator and having personally experienced divorce himself and the book’s first chapter, entitled “Commitment”, explains that the purpose of the book is to help the reader work through whether or not their marriage is worth saving. In effect, commitment really refers to what we are prepared to commit to and what kind of relationship we might consider worth committing to, rather than committing to conventional norms or marriage in and of themselves. You know from the moment you read the first chapter that you are going to be taken on a much more complex and true to life journey than most books of this genre dare to take you.

And the second chapter doesn’t disappoint. Retelling his experience as a family mediator, the Attorney at Love shares some of his more ‘juicy’ stories as he calls them, such as the time when he met with a husband who was surfing an “adult” dating website where he saw a picture of his wife naked, with the caption “Real Man Wanted” underneath, or the wife who was constantly ordering items from catalogues just so that she could open the door in the nude to greet the handsome UPS man. Filled with anecdotes, both familiar and sensational, the chapters roll on with sound advice which is lightened by Jim Duzak’s wonderful sense of humour, making the content easy to read and offering that much-needed light touch when being asked to soul-search and mull over some of our deepest, darkest fears.

Unafraid to go boldly where most other books of this type won’t, the next chapter, “Thinking about Affairs” does exactly that, with courage and candour. For the purists, this chapter will be deeply shocking but affairs are very much part of real life and the book in part goes on to consider under what circumstances affairs may be appropriate. Yes, you read that last sentence right. Whilst Jim Duzak’s book does not explicitly condone affairs (in fact, he even cites the emotive impact of making that choice as a warning bell, both for the present relationship and any future ones) it makes a point of looking at marriages as they really are: commitments coloured by good and bad days. Ultimately, we are told that affairs are “a notoriously unreliable way of determining long-term compatibility”. The question of honesty about any affairs that take place is also addressed in a way you would not expect – it is a gripping and thoughtful read.

With sections for Men Only (which of course we read, all the more eagerly for being forbidden fruit) and Women Only (which we read and which made us giggle – the honesty, always delivered with the softest of sentences), chapters dedicated to mediation, divorce, law (which although better suited to American readers has relevance for UK readers too as the systems are in many ways very similar)and how to get help if you’re not sure, every page is an eye-opener, a pragmatist’s paradise.

The openness in the book doesn’t just lie in the acceptance of day-to-day realities; it also lies in the author’s own candid reflections about his conflicted views on things like affairs and describes himself as a ‘moral relativist’, someone who sees standards and norms as relative to the era in which they exist and that is why the book has an undeniable power to it, making it your own personal warrior for the twenty-first century, relevant to the world now. I would even go so far as to say that there is too, a timeless quality to this contemporary take on relationships, not least of all because it is willing to contemplate topics and institutions which have spanned the breadth and width of time, without prejudice but always with caution and care.

Whether you’re looking to discover the truth about your marriage or how to meet new people and remake your life, Mid-Life Divorce and the Rebirth of Commitment is a one-off. Make sure it’s one you take off the shelf.

If you would like to purchase the book, you can do so here. 

And if you have any questions for the author, you can contact him here.

Jim Duzak, AKA Attorney at Love

LexisNexis very kindly gave Researching Reform the opportunity to take a look at its Family PSL service. Here’s what we had to say:

Okay, so PSL doesn’t stand for Putting Sexy back into Law but it should do, because it stands for all the right things when it comes to a legal service.

As a company before the advent of the internet, LexisNexis has had a history which already stretches over several continents, incorporating products designed to create fast and efficient access to legal intelligence. Now, it delivers this content online. From analytics to workflow solutions, it is pioneering online information, thanks to five billion searchable documents, from more than thirty thousand news, legal and business sources.

LexisNexis have very kindly allowed Researching Reform to slink around their LexisPSL Family package and being Twitter happy, we have already added them to our Follow Friday list and hash tagged them mercilessly in the run up to this review. It’s not often that Researching Reform takes to legal services quite like this but to our mind it is deserved and here’s why.

LexisPSL stands in fact for Professional Support Lawyer, a virtual tool which is designed to help lawyers navigate their way around their chosen field and keep up to date with the latest practice directions, news and precedents whilst allowing access to essential tools like forms, all at the touch of one’s fingertips, quite literally. The information provided is up to date, clear and concise and once you log on, there’s no telling where your digits might take you.

First to flash up onto the screen, is the home page. It is very well organised, with a simple layout which allows you to browse by topic, search by section or view the latest developments in your field. It will even record your recently viewed documents, so you can click back for ease of reference. However, my favourite feature on this page has to be the “Manage Legal Updates Option”. Here, you can elect to receive legal updates which are fed into your email, either daily or weekly, on any number of topics in your field. This saves you time and a little fumbling around if you’re too busy to log on to Lexis itself. If I had just once criticism of this feature though, it would be that it does tend to lag behind the rest of the net when breaking news starts to surf the web. However, it makes up for this somewhat by offering updates which are not always readily available on other servers.

Lexis also appears to have anticipated the conundrum that is the lawyer and his less than loving disposition to all things binary. In short, some lawyers have notoriously bad computer skills, so LexisNexis have taken that on board. Before Researching Reform receives hate mail for stating an uncomfortable truth (puts on crash helmet), we ourselves are the original techno bimbos and so are no strangers to feeling lost amongst the optic fibres from time to time. But it’s hard to lose your way with PSL.

Enter “LexisNexis Academy”, an entire training team plus website, dedicated towards helping you make the most of your new friends. The fantastic choice of formats for getting the tips you need online on how to manoeuvre around the service is nothing short of genius. Not just because there is so much choice, from public courses to telephone conferences and even one to one sessions, but because the structure of the session itself is well thought out and presented. Researching Reform did not try out the public course or any of the live sessions because we were too busy making mischief at work, so for those lawyers who don’t have the time to leave their desks or who work in an environment where talking is punishable by death, the iKnowledge and iLearning modules are superb. The 90 second iKnowledge Modules are videos which offer quick tips on navigation and are on average no longer than 50 seconds or so and the iLearning Modules are just amalgamations of the former for each area of law, which last around ten minutes each and mean you only have to watch one to get a full overview.

It may well be that for those lawyers who have subscribed to more sophisticated packages which include access to the library and webinar services for example that the tutor-led sessions are a must, but it does seem that everything is fairly straightforward and as such it may be that only the very computer shy might benefit from using these training tools. As clear and clever as they are, Researching Reform would suggest that if you’re not click-sensitive, you probably won’t need to access the academy.

So LexisPSL Family is sleek and efficient but perhaps one of the greatest bug bears in any online service are its personable elements: can you reach the face behind the interface? Again, Lexis delivers. From the start, customer service is at the forefront of the company’s mind. Once you’ve signed up to a package, the care you receive is meticulous. From the Customer Service department itself to your designated account manager, there is a strong, tangible feeling that the personal touch is paramount. Researching Reform made no end of mischief in this regard and emailed and telephoned dozens of people in a short space of time and found every person we spoke with to be polite and professional and just as important, pro-active. But Lexis doesn’t stop there. From the moment you log on, the service makes a point of being accessible. There are “Send us Feedback” and “Contact Us” tabs visibly located on the top of the Home Page with even a link to meeting the Lexis Experts in your field, should you feel compelled to have an afternoon chat about the finer points of the practice direction on Duxbury Calculations. You can’t help but feel that whoever designed the overarching format for this service really wanted to create a legal organism; a living, breathing body of work designed to respond swiftly to evolutionary pressure.

LexisPSL Family then, is a triple threat: Quality content, simply structured with superb customer service. In a world saturated with information, LexisNexis offers up an elegant tool for the urban jungle.

This Christmas WWF, one of the most respected conservation bodies in the world, is offering us the chance to ‘adopt’ polar bears, who are in danger of extinction; and the scheme is good.

All too often in the field of family law, adoption is cause for concern rather than joy, but this particular project run by the World Wildlife Fund (or WWF as it is generally known, due to the confusion its change of name caused in 1986) is a fantastic opportunity to give your children a truly wonderful gift and to give an endangered animal the gift of life.

The idea is simple; making conservation fun whilst focusing on looking after our environment. As we understand more about the food chain and the need to take care not to destroy nature’s balance, WWF have put together this package, which is aimed specifically at children with a view to encouraging them to take an interest in conservation and raise their awareness of environmental issues early on, so that hopefully that awareness stays and becomes part of the next generation’s subconscious.

The WWF website is very easy to follow and gives you all the information you need. From as little as £3 a month, you can choose to take care not only of polar bears, which are the newest members of this preservation project,  but also Bengal tigers, dolphins and more besides. The site explains that the monthly payment goes towards helping look after these animals, with the use of some seriously awesome technology: from satellite radio collars to internet tracking for the polar bears, you can even follow the bears as they make their way across oceans and archipelagos. It’s a truly brilliant idea.

As well as being able to follow the bears live on the net as they travel, once you take part in the scheme you get a pack in the post which includes a very sweet soft toy version of a polar bear your little one has chosen to take care of as well as a certificate and a pamphlet filled with information on the Svalbard polar bears, such as where they live, their diet and lots more fun facts all carefully put together to gently highlight the threats to endangered species and what WWF are able to do, with the help of donations like these. The pack also gives you links to animal screen savers and tracking sites.

The one very disappointing factor about the programme is that all of the bears who are being tracked seem to lose their radio collars after a few months, despite the claim on the WWF site that these collars are designed to be hard-wearing. This is a blow for the research project itself but also for the sponsors, who are going to be mainly children, looking forward to watching the animals they are caring for, progress. With no way to track the animals once the collars are gone or destroyed and with no warning on the site that this is a potential problem prior to making your donation, the lack of information on this front is not only disappointing but also dishonest.

If you do decide to sponsor a polar bear, do be prepared to tell your little ones that this may be the case. It is also not clear whether tracking is limited to the polar bears only or extends to other animals taking part in this conservation programme but it does appear to be the case that only the bears can be seen ‘live’.  To date, all four female polar bears do not appear to have working radio collars and all were last tracked in August of this year.

This aside, there are still plenty of good reasons to get involved. The value to our environment is a given plus point as the radio collars have collected some interesting information which you can see online but the ‘Adopt an Animal’ programme also combines nature with technology, which is likely to appeal to kids who are more computer mad than ever and in the main still love animals. Check out their website too; for kids and adults, there’s a lot of great stuff to see and do online and the content is careful not to overload the reader with heavy-handed dogma (pun intended) on preserving our wildlife.

WWF’s mission as stated on the information pack is “to stop the degradation of the planet’s natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature”. If you like the sound of that and you have a little person in the house who likes animals, this Christmas, you can’t go wrong with the gift of life.