Blogging and Education Professors

Mitchell Rubinstein noted today that the University of Wisconsin Law School gave a good deal of credit to Law Professor Ann Althouse, whose blog was ranked in the top 100 law blogs by the ABA. The law school came out with this press release. The ABA top 100 can be found here (no, don't bother checking, the Edjurist is not on the list). If you are into the law, there are a ton of great legal blogs (blawgs) about pretty much everything. The ABA has them in categories so it should be easy to find a few that suit you. My personal favorite? The Volokh Conspiracy (although I could live without the advertising it has on it now). Here are some other educational law blogs categorized at the ABA. And, one last hint, if you are looking for recent legal information and can't afford Westlaw or Lexis, searching the ABA Blawg Directory is a great place to start to find some current events and some legal analysis. It searches not only the educational law blogs, but also all the other legal based blogs. The ABA does screen the blawgs it chooses to list, so there is some degree of confidence in the material (at least better than Google). This is a good spot to point out to our students in educational law courses as they can go back to it even after they leave our class.

Anyway, this got me to thinking ... what if the Edjurist did by some miracle (and it would take a big one) wound up on this list? What would the education school that I work for had done? ... My guess? ... Probably the first thing they would have asked me is "what is a 'blog' and why are you doing that?" Even if this would have got to my school of education's media guy (who I am sure is familiar with blogs), I am not sure they would have done anything with it. Maybe I am underestimating schools of ed., but, having lived in both worlds, it seems law schools are much more keyed into emerging markets and communication streams. Schools of education, in their drive to remain pseudo-scientific in nature and mission, hold fast to traditional elements of scholarship. I really hope that schools of education pick up on these new scholarship outlets soon. Blogs should be an acceptable and even encouraged element of faculty scholarship as long as they pull their weight in traditional outlets as well ... but as of now they probably don't even count as service.