The Chronicle: Colloquy Live Transcript

Academic Blogging

Wednesday, June 4, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time

Do Web logs, or "blogs," contribute to academic discourse? What should academics who want to blog know about the medium?

Many academics have jumped on the blogging bandwagon, in which they maintain Web logs with their views on various issues, and links to other articles and Web sites. Some academics have embraced blogs as a new way for speedy, scholarly discussion. Others fear blogging may be a fad that may not encourage the most rigorous discussion.

» Scholars Who Blog (6/6/2003)

Eugene Volokh is a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles and the founder of the Volokh Conspiracy, a group academic blog (with 11 regular contributors) on legal and political issues. At UCLA, Mr. Volokh teaches courses on free-speech law, copyright law, and the law of government and religion. He will respond to questions and comments on Wednesday, June 4, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time. Advance questions are encouraged and may be posted now.

A transcript of the chat follows.

David Glenn (Moderator):
Will Web logs (typically known as "blogs") transform the relationship between scholars and the public? There are tantalizing reasons to believe that might be so. Blogs are vastly cheaper and more accessible than academic journals, yet they allow scholars (if they choose) to develop serious arguments at a serious length. They're also quick; they reach diverse groups of readers; and scholars can (again, if they choose) use a voice less dull than the typical op-ed page's, to say nothing of the typical journal's.

On the other hand, one always wants to be cautious when hyping the Internet. It may turn out that many scholars' blogs mimic the tedium of the worst academic e-mail lists -- that they'll be places where narrow sets of scholars gather to chew over the same questions again and again.

Joining us to help sort through these questions is Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles and the founder of The Volokh Conspiracy, a blog written in collaboration with roughly a dozen scholars, including his younger brother Sasha, a law student at Harvard University.

Mr. Volokh was born in the Soviet Union and came to the United States as a child. He graduated from UCLA at the age of 15, and then worked for several years as a computer programmer before turning to the law. He is the author of the casebook The First Amendment: Problems, Cases and Policy Arguments (Foundation Press) and the new Academic Legal Writing: Law Review Articles, Student Notes, and Seminar Papers (Foundation Press).

Thanks for taking time to be with us today.

Question from David Glenn:
What blogs did you first read? What appealed to you about them?

Eugene Volokh:
InstaPundit was the first, and it's still the main one. Basically, I just like Glenn Reynolds' editorial judgment -- he points to stuff I'm interested in, and makes comments that I find insightful and amusing. Some people read The New Republic or the National Review because they like the editors' judgment; I read InstaPundit.

Question from Frederick Emrich, Carleton University:
Weblog advocates have made much of the potential blogs have for promoting social change. Do you think that blogs will promote social change in academia? Or will academia exert control over blogs? Or will the two just exist as separate spheres?

Eugene Volokh:
The jury is still out on that, and will be for years. Blogging as we now know it is a fairly new medium, and it has only recently begun to really attract a substantial number of readers (and academic writers). We'll see what develops in coming years.

Question from David Glenn:
In discussions of the Chronicle article (see especially the comments field at Kieran Healy's site), there's been some argument about whether blogs are actually new and important. Some folks say that blogs are really no improvement over Usenet groups, which have existed for decades. Others say that blogs allow much more control over tone -- that they're much less likely to be taken over by cranks and hotheads. (When I interviewed Mark Kleiman, he said, "Someone pointed out to me that blogging is the perfect architecture for getting around the flame-war problem.") What do you think?

Eugene Volokh:
I think blogs *are* different from Usenet groups -- or discussion groups generally, whether implemented via Usenet, e-mail, the Web, or what have you -- for the reason mentioned. Discussion groups can be valuable, if they have a well-chosen set of members, good social norms, and a moderator who is willing to occasionally guide the conversation and help enforce the norms. But blogs can be valuable, too, because they're the voice of one person -- if, of course, you like that one person.

Question from Nick Carbone, Bedford/St. Martin's:
I don't think blogging will be fad; it'll be more like email, I'm guessing. Very ubiquitous. But given that, how will it figure, eventually, in shaping scholarly disciplines, and by extension, what counts for tenure? Or put another way, will a tenure review one day include blog site unique hits the way some reviews include summaries of how often one's article published in such-and-such journal has been cited?

Eugene Volokh:
Two thoughts on this: 1) I think blogging will eventually come to be valued the way that op-eds or media appearances are valued -- at my institution, we'd call it part of the person's service to the community, rather than part of the person's scholarship. Such service is rightly considered valuable, but it's also rightly considered to be less important than scholarship (at least at a university, as opposed to an advocacy group or some think-tanks). 2) But blogging is also a mechanism for scholars to promote their scholarship to a broader audience, both scholarly and nonscholarly. So even if scholars won't get faculty credit for blogging as such, they'll get more satisfaction because their ideas are being more widely spread -- and they may eventually get a better academic reputation as a result, precisely because more people will be noticing their ideas.

Question from David Glenn:
To your knowledge, have any readers been confused or annoyed by the ideological diversity of the dozen-or-so contributors to the Volokh Conspiracy? Do some readers expect a single flavor?

Eugene Volokh:
A few readers are bothered by it, but my sense is that many more are pleased. Note, though, that we have an intentionally limited range of diversity -- we're all more or less moderates, conservatives, or libertarians. In this, we try to follow the pattern of some of the better opinion magazines, which have some political variation but at the same time have a general tenor. I do think that if we had outright liberals, the blog would have a different flavor -- one that some readers would like more and others would like less.

Question from David Glenn:
Jack Balkin and Chris Bertram both told me that they believe the civility and ideological breadth of academic blogs are a rebuke to the gloomy arguments offered by Cass Sunstein in his 2001 book Republic.com (University of Chicago Press). Mr. Sunstein predicted that the Internet would draw many people into insular, self-reinforcing, and often extremist political communities. What do you think of Mr. Sunstein's pessimism?

Eugene Volokh:
I'm with Jack Balkin on this. Among other things, as some people have pointed out, when blogs criticize someone, they almost always link to them -- this makes it considerably easier for blog readers to see both sides of the issue than it would be for newspaper readers or TV watchers.

Question from Yule Heibel, independent scholar:
Is it necessary to define "scholar" or "academic" by institutional affiliation? What about independents? Does "contribution" to academic discourse happen only via institutionally affiliated scholars, whether they are blogging or not?

Eugene Volokh:
No; and some bloggers -- for instance, the grad students at Oxblog, or Clayton Cramer, who's an independent historian -- are treated by many blog readers the same way that academic bloggers are treated. The important factors for blog readers who are looking for a scholarly perspective are, I think, (1) the depth of the arguments, (2) the quality of the expertise behind the arguments, and (3) the scholarly (yet readable) tone of the arguments. At the same time, institutional affiliation does provide an important credential. When a law professor comments on the law, people will generally give more credence (at least at the beginning) to the professor's blog than they would to an independent scholar's blog. As will all trademarks, the label "Professor" is an imperfect proxy for quality -- but in an environment of information overload, it's a valuable one, and will affect at least people's initial impressions.

Question from tom abeles, editor, On the Horizon:
I am wondering what the half-life of "blogging" will be. Some are maintained by "trusted" individuals who scan the wild west of the web for information and may be,shortly, replaced by intelligent "bots". Others appear to serve the same world as "talk radio", or, in The Academy, an unconstrained rhetorical statement or question proferred in a conference or seminar to gain "air time" for a position- sound bites with a life time of the Mayfly- rising and falling more quickly than an article in a scholarly journal- Perhaps a gold mine for future cultural anthropologists looking for a thesis?

Eugene Volokh:
There are indeed many different kinds of blogs -- but that just shows the dangers of trying to generalize about "blogging." It wouldn't make much sense to make general pronouncements about the "bookosphere," because there are so many different kinds of books. That's even more so for the "blogosphere." Nor should it worry us that 90% of all blogs might be bad for various reasons. As Sturgeon's Law puts it, 90% of *everything* is crap -- 90% of books, 90% of blogs, 90% of music, and so on. So long as people can find the good stuff, the value of the medium is defined mostly by the amount and quality of the good, not by the fraction that's bad.

David Glenn (Moderator):
I should mention that I owe an apology to Chris Bertram, who has pointed out that I quoted and paraphrased him in a way that made him appear naive. I'm very sorry about that -- it was a sloppy construction. I didn't actually think that Mr. Bertram had believed that all libertarians are fluent in Nozick.

Question from David Glenn:
What appealed to you about building a group blog, as opposed to doing everything yourself?

Eugene Volokh:
(1) There's a particular pleasure in organizing a group effort with people whom one likes and respects. (2) I want a forum where I can easily convey, to a relatively large group of readers, various ideas that I might have. To do that, the forum has to provide a good deal of material every day; in a solo blog, there's pressure not to slack off, because then one loses the readers, and when one's ready to post again, one might not be able to regain them. And this pressure means misery for the blogger, and lower quality for the readers -- blogs work best when people blog because they want to, not because they feel they have to. Group blogging lets each blogger slack off periodically, and still have the forum when he's ready to go again.

Question from Jim McGee, adjunct Kellogg School:
Where do blogs fit in your other reading priorities - have they added to your load or displaced something else?

Eugene Volokh:
They've generally displaced print: I used to read the stories that the editors of the L.A. Times, the N.Y. Times, or the Wall Street Journal think are worth reading. Now I read blogs -- such as InstaPundit, Mickey Kaus's Kausfiles on Slate, Andrew Sullivan, during the war The Command Post, and so on -- and read the stories (in a wide range of newspapers and magazines) that the bloggers think are worth reading. Blogs provide a much wider range of editorial judgment to choose from, and it turns out that I like the editorial judgment of some bloggers more than I like the editorial judgment of some newspaper editors.

Question from Frederick Emrich, Carleton University, commons-blog:
Since the advent of the web, there have been moves to push faculty to use web pages and other internet technologies in their teaching. On the one hand, this has created new ways for faculty and students to stay in contact. On the other, it has in some cases built obstacles between them and allowed administrations to promote them as distance learning technologies in ways not necessarily to the advantage of students or teachers. Have you seen examples of blogs used as teaching tools that are particularly constructive or unconstructive? Are you aware of any attempts to promote blogs as teaching tools at the institutional level?

Eugene Volokh:
Excellent questions, but I'm afraid I have no answers -- I haven't followed this aspect of blogging. I know nothing about the subject, and despite that have no opinion.

Question from Jim McGee, adjunct Kellogg School:
We've been talking about blogs as a publication avenue. What about blog technology as a research tool - something along the lines of a dynamic research notebook? How do you see blogs helping as a source for working out ideas along the road to eventual publication elsewhere?

Eugene Volokh:
I've thought a bit about this, and I think it's theoretically possible -- I just haven't seen this work out concretely (my blog posts have sometimes led to op-eds, but not to scholarly articles), and I'm not sure how likely it is to happen. I suspect that much depends on people's personal research styles: Some people may find blogging a valuable source of inspiration or interaction with other researchers, while others might not.

Question from Susan Herzog, Eastern Connecticut State University:
I recently read that some English professors are using blogs to improve the writing skills of their students. Are you aware of this use of blogging? If you are, could you provide some URLs? Even if you aren't aware of such use of blogs, could you comment on the idea? Thank you. Susan

Eugene Volokh:
Sorry, wish I knew more about this, but I don't.

Question from Jim McGee:
apropos of Sturgeon's law, do you think that the "blogosphere" will contribute to helping you find the 10%? In addition to contributing to its share of the 90%, of course

Eugene Volokh:
Absolutely; because of hyperlinking, blogs are a great tool for people to find good stuff in what would otherwise be information overload. When you find a blogger you really like, that means that you'll probably like many of the bloggers that he likes; and as you follow his links, you'll find yourself discovering new bloggers that you might start reading on your own.

Question from David Glenn:
Let's talk a little about "blegging" -- asking one's readers for quick factual information or conceptual help. A few weeks ago you mentioned on your blog that you'd been vaguely thinking about writing a law review article on private detectives and the proper scope of individual privacy. You asked your readers for help in conceptualizing and framing such an article. Did you get productive responses? In general, have you found blegging to be useful? Does it bring you into contact with people outside academe?

Eugene Volokh:
1) Blegging is great at finding specific answers to specific questions, whether about computer technology, etymology, science, or what have you. 2) It's also helped me find people who are actually willing to invest a good deal of time and effort to help me solve particular computer problems. 3) It's less good, I think, at finding good arguments to work into one's scholarly piece. When a scholar-blogger is contemplating writing an article, he's the expert; he's thought about the subject; he's studied the field extensively. Most of his readers aren't going to be as knowledgeable, and aren't likely to contribute much that he hasn't thought of himself. This is the opposite of the situation described above in item 1, where a blogger asks for help on a subject that he's *not* knowledgeable in, and that readers may know more about than he does. At the same time, some of the readers will be quite knowledgeable in the field; and some others will have an interesting perspective to contribute, precisely because they aren't bound by the field's conventional assumptions. So while you shouldn't expect tremendous breakthroughs as a result of blegging for input on an article you're working on, you will sometimes get some pretty useful feedback.

Question from Invisible Adjunct:
A question from someone who is a liberal, and thus by definition a moderate: Since Professor Volokh is a legal scholar, I wonder if he could comment on the legal status of blogs in terms of libel law. Given the fact that a blog can easily and quickly reach an international readership, is it possible that someone could file suit against a blogger (say a blogger who posts from the US), from another country with stricter libel laws?

Eugene Volokh:
They could file the suit, but U.S. courts probably wouldn't enforce such a foreign judgment. So if you live part of the time in the U.S. and part of the time in Britain, you might worry about people suing you in British courts and enforcing the judgment when you go back to Britain. You might even worry about that if you sometimes visit Britain, depending on how British jurisdictional rules work on this. But if you're just going to stay in the U.S., and have no assets and do no business in a foreign country, then you needn't worry much about that foreign country's libel law.

David Glenn (Moderator):
We're roughly halfway through. We've gotten some interesting questions -- please keep them coming.

David Glenn (Moderator):
Re: Susan Herzog's question -- John Lovas of De Anza College has recently started a blog on writing instruction.

Question from Nick Carbone, Bedford/St. Martin's:
A follow up: Eugene, I take it you Blogs for academics as primarily a way to talk to nonacademic audiences. Is that because, generally, blog conventions call for shorter pieces, perhaps never longer than an op. ed. piece might be? Do you foresee a time when academics might create communities of blogsosphere's -- a poli sci blogoshere where poli sci faculty comment on one another's thoughts?

Eugene Volokh:
Interesting question. My sense is that blogs are primarily a way to talk to nonacademic audiences in part because there are better ways to talk to academic audiences -- e-mail based discussion lists, on many of which I participate, are a good example. Now I'm told that there's some blogging technology (livejournal, I believe, is an example) that allows people to mix the advantages of blogging and of discussion groups; maybe that's the way of the future for academic communities (and some other communities), but I'm just not sure.

Comment from Nick Carbone, Bedford/St. Martin's:
Susan H.: On Blogs and writing skills, try starting at the Kairos News Blog -- http://kairosnews.org. Likely there are links there (Blogs were on the program at the conference on composition that was in NYC recently.)

Question from David Glenn:
How do you feel about the word "blog"? Some people believe it's awkward and unfortunate -- but I guess the train has already left the station. It's hard to imagine another term supplanting "blog" at this point.

Eugene Volokh:
I like it, precisely because it sounds a bit silly.

Comment from Joseph Hart, Eastern Oregon University:
In reply to an earlier question about EdBlogging resources, here's a link to an RSS harvester by Stephen Downes that gathers postings from major Ed Tech blogs, http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/xml/edu_rss.cgi. Stephen is the author of the blog OnlineDaily. JH

Question from Ken Smith, Indiana University South Bend:
If, as you say, blog posts are more like op-ed pieces than traditional scholarship, and tend to promote one's scholarship rather than carry out that scholarship, in what sense are blogs academic discourse?

Eugene Volokh:
Blog posts aren't scholarly publications, so they're not academic discourse in that respect. But academic blogs are ways for academics to try to promote their academic ideas, both to people in the field (whether academics, students, or practitioners) and to people outside it; so they are academic discourse in that respect. I worry less about whether to label blogging "academic discourse," and more about what benefits blogging produces. If it benefits the writers and the readers, then it's worth doing, just as op-ed writing is worth doing.

Question from Mark Zollinhofer, Eastern Mennonite Univ.:
If blogs are to become more widely useful to the broader community, it seems like there will need to be a locator or finder, as the analog of Yahoo developed to help people search for web pages that were otherwise unknown. Is that an on-going effort?

Eugene Volokh:
Well, google already lets you find blog posts (as well as other pages) that focus on particular subjects; I think daypop and some other search engines let you do that just for blogs; and there've been news reports that google may provide for searching of blog posts separately from searching of the Web. (Of course, not all blogs are indexed in the search engines, but many of the more successful ones are.) But that's just locators of text -- locators of *quality* are tougher to find. I think that "linker" blogs such as InstaPundit are actually one of the best ways to find high-quality pages that you otherwise wouldn't know about.

Question from Dr. Joann Kroll Wheeler, Tarleton State University - Texas A&M System:
In what ways can blogs be used to increase learner-learner and/or instructor - learner interaction in online courses?

Eugene Volokh:
An interesting question, but I have to pass, since I know very little about distance ed.

Question from David Glenn:
Do you share Eric Muller's concerns about "talk-radioization" and ideological polarization among academic bloggers?

Eugene Volokh:
I much like Eric's work -- he'll actually be guest-blogging on The Volokh Conspiracy tomorrow and Friday -- but I haven't read those particular concerns, so I don't want to speak specifically to them. I do think that blogging is more valuable when it's (1) polite, (2) thoughtful, (3) attentive to counterarguments, and (4) done by people who are willing to question their own preconceptions and those of their political circle. But I haven't seen any evidence that academic blogging is moving away from that, or moving towards that. Some people operate that way, others don't. I know of no trend here.

Question from David Glenn:
Could you give a brief explanation of RSS and other "news-aggregation" software? Will this allow academic bloggers to reach broader audiences?

Eugene Volokh:
I'm not an RSS expert, but my understanding is that RSS lets people read several blogs at once, as posts are posted: The readers can just have the blogs' RSS feeds being displayed in a window, and can then scan each post's headline and click if they want to read further. I don't read blogs that way (though maybe I should), but I'm told that quite a few people do.

David Glenn (Moderator):
One important blog that went unmentioned in my article is Lawrence Lessig's. Mr. Lessig, a professor of law at Stanford University and the founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, writes extensively about software, intellectual property, and media concentration.

Question from David Glenn:
To what extent are your colleagues and students at the law school aware of the blog? Has the blog changed your persona within the law school?

Eugene Volokh:
Some colleagues and students are aware of it and read it, others are vaguely aware of it and don't read it, and others have better things to do with their time than to think about it. To my knowledge, the blog hasn't changed my persona within the law school, but that's partly because I was already pretty outspoken in other media (radio, newspapers, TV, and such). And of course for all I know it has influenced people's views of me, but they're just too polite to inform me of that.

Question from Joel Reidenberg, Fordham Law School:
Eugene, do you have any sense if faculty are linking to blogs for use in courses as instructional tools?

Eugene Volokh:
I have a simple answer, and it's "no"; no, I don't have any sense of this. Good question, though -- if you have an answer, I'd love to hear it. I did just get an e-mail from a law review editor who said that they're probably going to publish an article that cites some of my blog posts, and that this would to their knowledge be the first such article (at least if one focuses on the modern crop of blogs). That would be pretty cool.

Comment from Yule Heibel, independent:
About institutional affiliation & expertise: there seem to be relatively few blogging scholars in the humanities (vs. law, technology), and none that I know of in my field of art history (and I myself almost never blog about art). On the one hand, critics (of art, culture, media) should be having a blast in the blogosphere, but it's not coming from scholar-experts in those fields. I wonder if that points to a larger disconnect between popular culture (including lived experience) and "high" culture. The jurists and techies blogging out there are so much more vibrant because you're making connections between the two that the humanists in academe haven't been able to make.

Question from Michael Lougee, U. Minnesota:
Has anyone tried "serializing" any creative writing, to see whether readers would return day-after-day (or weekly) to keep reading a good story? I'm also curious about blogs for courses and blogs for events in an academic career (starting, ending, first-time student teaching, first anatomy cadaver, etc).

Eugene Volokh:
Stephen King tried it with a novel a year or two ago; I forget quite what happened to this. I also have the sense that lots of amateur creative writers are publishing via their blogs. But I don't really know that chunk of the blog universe.

Question from David Glenn:
Has the experience of blogging changed (even in subtle ways) your standard academic writing? Are you now a faster or clearer or more relaxed writer than you were before the blog began?

Eugene Volokh:
I wish I could say "yes," since that would justify all the hours I've spent on the blog, but I can't be sure one way or the other.

Comment from Frederick Emrich, commons-blog:
I believe the simplest way to explain a news aggregator is that it is software that reads and displays links to stories on any of a number of sites using RSS feeds. The user can then scan heads en masse from a number of online publications and click on any individual heads to read any posting of interest.

Question from Rana, Historian:
What are your thoughts on anonymous blogs, particularly in terms of the implications for academic freedom? Does blogging anonymously enhance the level of scholarly discourse in that ideas can be shared freely without fear of censure or personal risk, or does it detract from it, in that it is difficult to determine the professional credentials of the author and to make connections to other work he or she has produced?

Eugene Volokh:
A very interesting and complex question. A few thoughts: (1) Two of my cobloggers are anonymous. This lets them blog more freely, but at the same time my readers have some assurance of the quality of the blogging (and especially of the general quality of the factual assertions that underlie the posts, which readers might not themselves be able to evaluate) -- I invited these people, and I'm thus vouching in some measure for their worth. So that might be a good way of getting the best of both worlds. (2) Purely anonymous blogs will probably get fewer readers, at least at the outset, because the author won't have clearly visible credentials; and some readers might be especially skeptical about what they read from an anonymous source. But if their arguments seem sound, and if other bloggers who know about the field link to the posts, then readers will become more secure and more willing to read. (3) The sad fact is that readers should be skeptical of everything -- including of things they read in the New York Times, of things they hear on television, of things they read in books written by credentialed academics, of things they read in blogs written by credential academics. An author's anonymity is an extra signal that reminds readers to be especially skeptical; but ultimately, I doubt that it should much affect readers' judgment (at least in most instances), and I think that eventually it won't much affect readers' judgment (and perhaps isn't even affecting it much today).

Comment from Jim McGee:
apropos of Joel Reidenberg's question about classroom use of blogs for learning, I required students to write blogs in an MBA level course on knowledge management that I taught at Kellogg in the Spring of 2002. I wrote about the experience (which was mixed) here - http://www.mcgeesmusings.net/2002/10/23.html#a2598

Question from Frederick Emrich, Carleton University, commons-blog:
David Winer has suggested that weblogs will come to replace traditional journalism as our major source of news. From my perspective, the possibility of such a thing coming to pass has its advantages (in terms of allowing people to be heard) but also important disadvantages (such as the progressive loss of "quality control" in information). Do you see any similar concerns for the future with respect to weblogs and academia?

Eugene Volokh:
If I had more confidence in "quality control" from the mainstream media, then I'd be more worried. But all of us have lots of experience with how the media gets things badly wrong in those fields that we're expert in. Why should we think the media gets it right in other areas? They don't; their quality control isn't that great; and the benefits of diversity of viewpoints, and quality control brought by greater criticism, outweigh the costs of some more not always reliable information being distributed. This having been said, I suspect that large organizations will always have some advantages in news gathering, especially gathering of journalistic facts, as opposed to published scholarly research. Such news gathering just requires resources that individuals tend not to possess. Commentary, fact-checking, news criticism, and popularization of academically gathered facts are going to be much more affected by blogging much sooner than core news gathering will be.

Comment from Nick Carbone, Bedford/St. Martin's:
Here's a faculty person who used a blog in his course: Mark Crane taught a science writing course w/ this blog: http://161.28.27.224/~cranema/sciwrite.html

Question from David Glenn:
Do you ever fear that you're sabotaging your chances of a judicial nomination by generating such a long paper trail on such easily-demagogued topics as the sociology of sex toys?

Eugene Volokh:
Not really. I don't think that organizing one's academic life, and even one's public commentary, around the vague possibility that some day someone might want to appoint one a judge, is likely to either make me happy, or make me a judge. I prefer to say what I think is worth saying, and let the chips fall where they may.

Question from Frederick Emrich, commons-blog:
Do you have any words of advice for academics who think they may be interested in blogging, but don't know where to begin? What should they think about in terms of technology, content, potential problems, and so on?

Eugene Volokh:
Blogger is a good place to start -- when it works, it works well, and it's pretty easy to use. I'm about to shift from it, because it's been too unreliable recently. But it's probably the best way to get into this, and to experiment.

Comment from Joel Reidenberg, Fordham Law School:
Comment on instructional use of blogs: Just did a quick Google search and it turns out that blogs are in sporadic use for courses in a wide range of fields from journalism to web design. Some were instructor blogs geared to the course. One interesting blog was a class created blog that counted for 50% of each student's grade (i.e. the student's individual contribution.)

Question from Joseph Hart, Eastern Oregon University:
I used a weblog (the EduResources Weblog at http://radio.weblogs.com/0114870/) to document parts of my sabbatical work during the past nine months. The weblog provided a very useful vehicle to share what I was reading, thinking, and developing. I believe that I was able to make valuable contacts via the weblog that I would not have encountered through ordinary email or listserv communications. My question is, "Have other universities made use of weblogs to facilitate sabbatical explorations and communications?"

Eugene Volokh:
Great idea! I haven't heard about it before, but more people should do that.

Question from David Powers:
How does blogging avoid the common problem of Internet error? After all, something as ephemeral as a posting that is cheaply corrected does not seem to carry the same gravity as a book or article that puts the publisher's fortune and reputation at stake.

Eugene Volokh:
Of course -- and it shouldn't carry the same gravity. But on the other hand, the fact that a posting *is* cheaply corrected may often make it *more* reliable, precisely because the errors do get corrected. And this also makes blogging a great medium for people to express opinions that aren't yet fully checked out, or that aren't squarely within the speaker's current expertise (especially if the speaker makes clear that his views are tentative or impressionistic). And after all, do any of us get all or even most of our ideas and knowledge from books and articles that put the publisher's fortune and reputation at stake? I don't think we do, and we shouldn't. We ought to rely on a mix of sources, of varying degree of reliability, timeliness, and such: books, scholarly articles, articles by newspaper reporters, op-eds, radio and TV comments, personal conversation -- and blogs.

Question from Jim McGee:
Blogs run on a very different time cycle than other academic outlets. Any thoughts on how that may influence how they fit into the overall writing mix? I'm thinking about how much of academic discourse actually takes place through working papers, preprints, etc and that by the time something reaches formal publication most people who need to know about something new in your research already know about it. Will blogs contribute to making that "invisible college" more visible?

Eugene Volokh:
Yes, absolutely -- though I don't think that the working papers / preprints world is very visible already.

David Glenn (Moderator):
We've reached the end of our allotted hour. Thanks again to Eugene Volokh for taking time to do this -- and thanks for all of the thoughtful questions. I'm sorry we didn't have time to answer them all.

Eugene Volokh:
It's been a great pleasure participating -- thanks very much for having me on!