Lots of law faculty and law librarians (and at least one Dean) are posting to blogs created at CALI's Classcaster Legal Education Blog/Podcast Network.

One of those that I kept running across because of the interesting posts was the AELR Blog. It seemed like someone different was posting every day so I decided to follow up and asked Professor James Duggan at Southern Illinois University School of Law what was up.

The response was even more interesting than I expected.

He and Library Director Frank Houdek are co-teaching a course in Advanced Electronic Legal Research and one of the requirements of the course is for students to find and post relevant articles from the Internet. Here's the description from the syllabus...

"...Students must subscribe via RSS feed to at least three (3) research and/or legal technology blogs. Students will be expected to monitor the blogs on a continuing basis and to post information learned from them to the AELR Blog on a regular basis during the semester (i.e., at least once a week, minimum total of 15 postings). While the postings will not be graded, their level of thoroughness, accuracy, critical analysis) will be considered in determining the "participation" component of the final course grade..."

This is cool on so many different levels.

First, it exposes students to all sorts of information on the Web.

Second, all of the other students benefit from the entire class's work.

Third, everyone else who wants to follow along and can participate (comments are enabled on the blog).

Fourth, students will learn about vetting sources and authority of the things they post. Others are reading their work and can see if they do a good job of finding and analysing the quality of the articles they find.

Would something like this be useful for any law school course? I don't see why not. It makes the subject matter come alive with real-time, present-day relevance. It engages the students to fit what they are learning into larger contexts. It challenges and teaches the instructors, too.

Here's what else Professor Duggan had to say...

"...We feel the assignment serves two major purposes:

(1) by having students monitor legal research/technology blogs, they are receiving a "pain free" and self-initiated supplement to the course materials that we provide to them for the subject matter of the course;

(2) by having students also monitor at least one blog in a subject field of their choice (e.g., family law, criminal law, etc.) they are introduced to a valuable method for keeping abreast of developments in their subject specialities. .."

Right on!

This is the read/write web applied to education. This is Rip/Mix/Learn.

If you are a law faculty at a CALI-member law school (almost all US law schools), you can setup a blog at Classcaster yourself for your courses. It's free, and it will benefit your students.