ECS and Web 2.0

One of the best but least known resources in the Education World are the StateNotes put out by the Education Commission of the States. Many fellow researchers are vaguely familiar with them and I see them referred to occasionally in scholarly writing, but the StateNotes and the ECS Issue Sites are rarely a education scholar's first stop when looking for information on a given topic (they are probably a first stop for policy folks and legislative aides). This lack of use by scholars is unfortunate as the StateNotes and Issue Sites are a great way to quickly access 50 state laws and regulations as well as relevant research reports and other publications on most education topics. You don't have to be an education law scholar to use this stuff and it would be a great way for non-legal scholars to look at the law as applied to their topic and integrate it into their thinking.

Having worked at ECS and seen the process in action, I can give a little insiders info. First, Kathy Christie, who is now the Chief of Staff, and the good folks of the Information Clearinghouse maintain what has to be one of the best education policy libraries in the U.S. There is a row of file cabinets organized by topic and every time a new report comes out the report is filed under the appropriate topic. This has been going on for years and years so it is pretty extensive. Anyway, then a lot of that information finds its way to links on the web under ECS Issue Sites and those reports spur research that becomes ECS StateNotes. Sometimes these things are sponsored by corporations and sometimes they are part of broader research projects, but they try to get as much information on the Web as they can and make it as recent and relevant as they can. (Disclaimer: I wrote 4 StateNotes (1), (2), (3), (4), in my time with ECS, so obviously I want them to be used more).

Here are some new ECS StateNotes that relate to education law for instance:

School Prayer, Moment of Silence, Other Policies Concerning Religion (March 2008) - Michael Colasanti

State Education Governance Models (March 2008) - Mary Fulton

State Collective Bargaining Policies for Teachers (Jan. 2008) - Michael Colasanti

Okay, couple things here. First, I want more scholars and education students to use ECS. It should be a site that we professors encourage students to use and that we bookmark in our browsers. So, we need to do a better job of using this resource. Especially education law scholars because a lot of what ECS does relates to law and policy.

Secondly, however, it would be nice if ECS made their site more Web 2.0 friendly. For instance, it would be nice if each time they put out a new StateNote, they would RSS it so that it showed up in my aggregator. I am a busy guy so I don't think to check ECS every couple months to see what's new. They need to bring whats new to me.  At a minimum, it would be nice if they would RSS their E-Connections newsletter which does sort of summarize what's new, but in the bevy of daily e-mails in my inbox I often neglect to open. I did notice they have recently RSSed their E-Clips, which is daily report of 5-6 news articles across the country that ECS Staff feel are valuable. The RSS Link can be found here. If you RSSed these things you could not only do a better job of notifying your audience when new resources are available, but also you could make widgets which could be embedded on the Web. I made a widget of the E-Clips RSS feed to show what is possible (you can put that on your site if you want, just click on options to get the HTML Code).

Also, in addition to RSSing everything, it would be nice if they expanded their web presence with blogs. A lot of policy organizations are blogging these days (the latest is the Fordham Foundation's FlyPaper) but ECS is not blogging ... at all. So in the increasingly powerful blogosphere (it has made Andy Rotherham a star) ECS has no voice and other policy organizations are managing to gain more and more influence with the Web 2.0 generation as we begin to fill policy, academic, and practitioner positions. Having worked there I think a blog similar to FlyPaper or the Quick and the Ed would be fairly easy to do. Policy folks such as Jennifer Dounay, Mary Fulton, Michael Griffith and Kyle Zinth have a lot of knowledge and great things to say that doesn't all come out in ECS publications.

I just love my old employer and I want to see them used more in scholarly circles. I think with a little effort on both sides we can do a lot better job.