Legal Commentary

I make extensive use of blogs of the classes I teach; basically, it is a TWEN site, but without the proprietary software. I use it for multiple purporses: I post course materials and assignments and I post the audio for each class the recording is the quid pro quo for banning laptops). I urge students to post questions or comments about the course materials or the discussions (this ramps up mainly during exam time, not during the course of the semester).

I also require students to post information, news stories, new cases, etc., that come up during the semester. To help with that, I include on the blogan extensive blogroll of news sources, subject-based law professor blogs, and aggregating blogs (Bashman, SCOTUSBlog, etc.). In part, my goal is to get students in the practice of reading blogs and and other information sources on a regular basis. Obviously, most students are not going to blog regularly as practicing lawyers (although the writing practice is good for students). But blogs are going to be around for at least a little while and they are great sources of information about events and changes in the law and in public policy; it seems to me that a good, well-informed lawyer should include these sources as part of practice and regular keeping-up reading. The results of this are mixed. Some classes do very little of this extra reading/blogging. On the other hand, in another class, 75 students produced more than 500 posts, many of which were on new and timely issues.

Am I wrong in thinking that keeping-up-with-the-blogs is important? Is this less important than I think?