I want to do a little catching up today. I had an extremely busy, but productive, summer. But, lately that has left little time for blogging as I have been traveling around the state and my college coordinating projects. And, I want to make some of those public:
First, I am coordinating an event in conjunction with the Education Law Association in Louisville, Kentucky on October 21 in the evening. The event is tentatively called "Rose at 20: The Past and Future of School Finance Litigation" and will be held in the Brown Hotel's Gallery Ballroom in Louisville. More details will follow, but I'll leak a little secret on the blog that a very high ranking Kentucky official is planning to be in attendance and speak at the event. We also have a lot of other dignitaries on board as well as several experts on school finance both in Kentucky and around the nation (Kern Alexander, Craig Wood, William Thro, Bill Koski, to name a few). The Kentucky Law Journal is doing a special issue for the occasion. And, Scott and our new colleague Neal Hutchens (who I hope to have another announcement about coming soon) have been helping out on the event. Anyway, you'll hear lots more about it in the near future, but thanks to Richard Day for helping to publicize it already.
Second, if you have been following my twitter feed, you'll know I have been working on a new University of Kentucky, College of Education website. It is in public beta right now (and we have said to be careful about releasing it to the public for the next month - but I think I earned the privilege of announcing it here), so there are still some tweaks that need to be made. Anyway, leading that effort was a challenging and rewarding experience, but it took a ton of time this summer. The biggest website I have built to this point was the one you are looking at, so the COE site was a couple magnitudes of scale bigger. But, I do a lot of talking about technology leadership, so I thought I should do some for my own college. I am starting a new blog for our department that is going to serve as sort of news and events source, so for those followers in Kentucky, that may be worth putting in your feed.
Otherwise, things have been consistently busy. I taught special education law for the first time this summer and it was a blast. I tried out some complicated simulations of IEP, MD and Due Process hearings and the students seemed to enjoy it (although they were probably too competitive). This semester I am back to teaching my regular education law course to a new cohort of principal candidates, so I am glad to be back to my comfort zone. I am debating whether to put my course up on iTunes, so if I do, I'll pass that along as well.
And, all of that above is sort of my excuse for not paying as much attention to this space as I normally do. But, I plan to remedy that immediately. I am going to bring on new contributors, new content, new features, new EdjuristTV episodes ... just to basically be your online source for information on law and education.