About 13 years ago I was sitting in a library research class in law school and learned about this thing called a "blawg" from Frank Houdek, a professor at SIU law. He tasked us to find the blawg for our area of interest ... so I looked for education law. Yeah, didn't find one in 2003. So, I started one and after a couple of iterations, this blog, The Edjurist, was the result.
It has been a fun ride. For several years, I was the only education law blog, especially after Scott McLeod merged "At the Schoolhouse Gate" into the Edjurist around 2008 when I came on board with CASTLE. After a while, a few more began to emerge and I'm proud that I helped to consult on several of their foundings such as Jim Gerl's outstanding blog on Special Education Law and Neal Hutchens HigherEducationLaw Blog. Later, serious mainstream P-12 education law blogs emerged such as Mark Walsh's at Education Week and Derek Blacks at LawProfsBlog.
Meanwhile, I was busy trying to earn tenure at UK ... which thankfully I did. I brought on wonderful additional contributors, but we never managed to get the daily feed of content it takes to maintain a healthy blog. Blogging, still, is not a serious activity amongst tenure and promotion committees ... unfortunately. After tenure, instead of having more time for blogging ... I helped to start a new school. Anyway ... you know the story if we are still showing up in your feed. Thanks to those that played along during the decade in which I really kept it active. We broke new ground together into which others have followed ... and for that I'll always be thankful and proud. But ... time moves on.
For the Edjurist ... Kevin Brady (one of our contributors) will be taking the old content and bringing it into his new efforts at his UCEA Center for Leadership in Law and Education at the University of Arkansas. He will announce details about that soon.
For me, the work is changing gears. Please find me now blogging (regularly) at Recode.School. My work will still include law (and technology) but I'm focusing very tightly on recoding the structures underpinning our education system. The foundation of our education system has generally not change for about 100 years, so it is time to tackle an upgrade to our public education system. I hope to be helpful in that effort. So ... if you are reading this ... please be so kind as to pop over there and hopefully add it to your RSS feed.
Thanks again for all the great times and the memories. I loved blogging here and won't ever forget it.