Let’s get digital

A free app called LawBot has been in the news recently. It is a “chatbot”, built by four Cambridge law students and sets out to advise victims of crime on their rights. Their initiative—they built it in their spare time—together with the idea of students organising their learning as a public good, goes to the core of what universities are about—indeed goes right back to the foundation of universities, and in two ways. First, it emphasises student achievement and agency. At the first medieval university, in Bologna in the 1080s, it wasn’t monks but students who ran the university. They developed the new universitas , negotiated with Bologna town council over their rights and obligations within the city, disciplined themselves, organised teaching and assessment, hired scholars, looked after student wellbeing, set up systems of text copying and dissemination to students who came from all over Europe to study there. Students were the university in ways that are almost inconceivable to us now.

Second, LawBot