One Blog Per Law Student
What if every law student had a blog?
They could post their notes, and commentary on their learning experiences, thoughts about their school and professors. It would be sort of like a disaggregated RateMyProfessor.com, SwapNotes.com all in one.
The value of websites like RateMyProfesser and SwapNotes is in the fact that they aggregate all of this information in one place, but what if all of these law student blogs agreed on a simple tagging system so that the information could be more easily aggregated? Think of this as a del.icio.us for law students. An agreed upon tagging system is basically a taxonomy – something that every librarian understand going back to Dewey.
CALI has over 100,000 law students registered on it’s website. Most (all?) of the students come here to run our lessons, but it would not be difficult for us to offer them a free blog account for educational purposes.
Perhaps I am just describing a sort of MySpace for law students, but with a legal education bent.
This is sort of what we were thinking with CALISpaces – a currently underdevelopment project at CALI, but the recent discussion about SwapNotes and other student-note sharing websites has gotten be thinking about the community of law students and what they have to share with each other and with their law professors.
A "safe" place for this community to aggregate it’s influence and it’s resources seems like it would be a good thing, but I am stuck on whether a blog is the right tool. CALISpaces intends to be a file storage space where files can be selectively shared with others – like other students in a study group, faculty in a course you are taking, etc.
CALISpaces should have some kind of blog or outward facing component to let students put things that they want others to see. It should have a standard taxonomy so that similar resources across all law student CALISpaces could be found, searched and aggregated.
This is very much the Personal Learning Environment or E-portfolio idea that has been discussed on many higher-ed blogs for a couple of years.
Hmmmm.
