Education Law Research in a Cyberage

I'm at the Education Law Association conference in San Antonio and I just gave a presentation on Education Law Research in a Cyberage (slides below) with Kevin Brady, an education law professor at North Carolina State.

I'll hit some of the major points I made in my presentation, although not all because I plan to publish this in an article when I get some more research.

1. The Internet is ubiquitosly used for education law research. Even the older members of the education law field have highly adopted Internet-based research.
2. Of the members of the education law field, about 1/2 primarly used fee based sources for education law research and about 1/2 primarily use free resources.
3. Of the free resources, there is not dominate resources. There was great diversity in responses concerning which free resources people used the most.
4. Web 2.0 resources are changing how legal research is conducted. Sources like PreCYdent, Altlaw, and Public.Resource.org allow for a bottom up approach to providing educational law sources rather than the top down approach of Westlaw and Lexis. (More resources are on my Find Ed. Law Info page).
5. Blogs are becoming a major resource for information on education law. Check out my blogroll on the left. 
6. There is an equity issue for people on the education side of education law. Attorneys and law professors have nearly unlimited access to Westlaw and Lexis, the main legal information providers. People in schools of education do not have such access and can't afford the hundreds of dollars per month it takes to get access.
7. There are differences in the resource of first choice for professors (textbooks), attorneys (caselaw) and practitioners (google).

Anyway, those were some of our findings. We are just beginning this journey on education law research and we plan to add qualitiative elements to our research to get more specific detail on the challenges that people in the education law field are facing when it comes to obtaining information. On thing is certain, though. The way we find and process information is rapidly changing. We could not have given the presentation we gave today five years ago and the presentation we give five years from now will look nothing like the presentation we gave today. It is a fun time to be working in this field.