Building a New Edjurist: What Would You Like to See?

During the rest of the summer I am working on building a new Edjurist website. I will still be posting here, but sometime in late July I will move over to a new, far more powerful platform. The new platform allows me to take the Edjurist beyond blogging and offer a range of different resources related to education law. I will still have the same web address, but you might have to update your RSS feeds. 

I am also going to be collaborating with a giant of the edublogosphere in a new project to bring some topical educational leadership professor blogs under one banner. I won't announce who it is yet, but your hint is that the organization's book club this summer drew over 100 people!

Here are some of my ideas I am working on for the New Edjurist:

• Blog: Same old same old there. The blog won't change much at all.
  
• Ed. Law Blog Search Page: See here. 
• Complete Ed. Law Blogroll: Want to get everyone their Technorati ratings. I will probably make a widget that others can embed on their blogs (I will give instructions) so that we can grow our little community here. 
  
• Forum: An educational law forum can be used by anyone as long as their topic relates to educational law. Anyone can post discussions or questions there and get responses from others. This is a give a little get a lot collaboration where folks can begin to pool their knowledge.
  
• Case Database: A lot of the cases in educational law get referred to a lot, but are not collected in one place. Cases will be collected here (at least the outside links will be collected) so that anyone with an interest in a particular topic within educational law can click that topic and get the most important and referred to cases in that area. It won't be a complete list (that would be an enormous task) but it should have most of the big cases. 
• Links to State Education Law Statutes: Education is largely governed by these statutes so it makes sense to link to them online. I will try to do it in a map interface.
  
• Ed Law Instructional Database: A lot of the materials I use in class will be posted here for open access. Links to relevant videos, articles, blog posts, etc. by topic will be provided and I will provide my syllabi. It is a place for teachers of Ed. Law to collaborate. 
• Organization Links: Links to other organizations interested in educational law. Possibly with a yearly confernence overview for finding the ed. law conferences near you (there are dozens of ed. law conferences around the U.S. each year). 
  
• Job Board: Not sure how much this will get used, but I am fine posting links to advertisements for ed. law jobs.
  

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on those aspects, but also I want to hear what you always wanted online related to educational law and never had. I am not a fantastic webbuilder, but I will do what I can. It will probably take me at least a year to build it completely, so any requests on which items I should work on first? I am even willing to take color palatte suggestions. Some (including my wife) don't find the current Edjurist site very attractive. 

Also, let me just throw this out there and see what you think. I am thinking about including advertising on the site that I would pool in a non-profit and use to build an educational law scholarship fund. I would hold a national competition to pick the winner and then provide whatever yearly income the advertising generated to that student. The first year it probably wouldn't be much, but I think it would grow as the site grows. What do you think of that? I am not a fan of advertising on my site, but I do think it might be worthwhile if we can inspire a few more people to study in the Ed. Law field.

Anyway, I am building, so now is the time to let me know your suggestions! You can e-mail me or leave a comment.

Comments

[Jon Becker]

Go, Justin! No ideas yet, but wanted to let you know that I got an e-mail from a colleague teaching school law. He wanted to know what I thought the 10 hottest issues in ed. law are. I sent him to your public Netvibes page. I think he's going to be sorry he asked! (-:

Rock on.

[D.C. Hess]

I for one would love to see a case database. As a young teacher, I often find myself questioning the practices of my school and wondering, "Is this legal?" I'd love to see a searchable database of ed laws and cases that can searched via keywords. This would be an incredible resource for schools and teachers!

[Justin B.]

That's great D.C. - you are exactly the kind of person I am building this for. In the beginning, I am not sure how searchable it is going to be. It will be more topical than searchable. Over the years, I will refine the topics so that eventually the topics become fairly narrow. But, I will be building in some search capabilities. Enough so that you might be able to find a case or two on any given topic.

Anyway, be sure to check back in a couple months D.C. and give it a spin.

[jim gerl]

Hi Justin,

Congrats on pushing the envelope!

I really like the idea of a case database. Try to come up with a way that the cases could be cited. Say,
3 Edjurist.com 1250

Many SpEd cases are in data bases that you have to pay to get into. This inhibits, parents, students and persons without resources from ever finding them. It would be great if the big cases were available to all. I realize that there are copyright issues, but if you utilize opinions from court websites or HO decisions from state DOE websites that might be better.

Also links to the federal statutes, IDEA & Nclb at least would be good, as well as, the federal regs for both. (I do worry about lay persons trying to practice law; sometimes these things don't really mean what they say. For example, "placement" means at least three different things.)

Also links to the really excellent blogs!!!!!

I'll think more about this.

[Justin B.]

"3 Edjurist.com 1250" --- That's hilarious. Perhaps someday, eh?

In the beginning I don't think I will have any citation style like that. It will just a topical system of links to outside cases - cited by someone else. Yeah, I will not cite to anything that is published in a for-profit manner. I can link to most of the supreme court cases from Oyez or LII, and the more recent lower federal and state court cases from their online sites. I think most federal circuit courts and most state supreme courts put their cases online these days. I don't think the district courts or state appellate courts put their cases online yet. But, they will eventually and when they do, I will pick those up too. (At least as many as I can).

Don't have too high of expectations for this at first. This is just me building this all on my own (no staff ... yet!!!) when I have time (I still have to get tenured at UK and this really doesn't help at all with that). But, I think we should shoot for the moon here and see where we wind up. I don't think there is any harm in trying and failing. Because this will build over time, as long as I continue trying, the site will steadily improve.

But, I appreciate you thinking about it. The more that people can help me the better it will be. Helping might be as simple as deciding which cases are "important" enough to link to.

In fact, over time I would much prefer this to be a total collaboration. I just have found that most people don't value the web enough yet to spend time on projects like this --- someone has to show them that it is valuable first, and then they will help. So, that is what I consider my initial effort to be - Showing people that this is valuable to do. Once people see that it is valuable, I think more people will want to get on board. I would love to hand this off someday to an association, like the education law association, where contributors from around the world can maintain the site.

Anyway, eventually, if people want to be involved, my publishing platform allows for that. I can give you login access and you can contribute. People that are willing to do that, I can call Associate Editors or something so that they have a title they can write on their resumes. If people really are interested in helping, I can think about a structure so that we can all beneift from our work in terms of reputation and whatnot.

Thanks for the thoughts Jim.