Orin Kerr blogged last week about “Rethinking Blogging-as-Scholarship” and how Professor can incorporate blogging to advance their scholarship. This set off a flurry of blog posts from scholars across the interwebs. So I tweeted a while back about liveblogging an article, and I asked Professor Kerr about it:
Orin, do you see any value in using collaborative technologies (a Wiki, or perhaps Google Wave), as an effective means to allow Profs to present their scholarship-in-progress online? I have limited experience with Wave, but it seems to be well suited to show a Law Review article as it develops.
In my experience, the value of watching an article develop while it’s in progress is pretty small. Perhaps it might be of interest for a particularly prominent academic, like a Larry Lessig, who would draw an eager following. But I suspect that no one is interested in how the rest of us write articles.
Well, I’m going to try it anyway, and see how it works.I’m working on a lot of articles. Once in a while, I will post part of a work-in-progress article to these pages, and open it up for comments. These ideas are raw, under-developed, and need work. But this process will force me to stay on track, and hopefully obtain some valuable feedback from the Interwebs. Who knows? Maybe this could catch on. Or Epically fail. I would use Google Wave, but not enough people have access to it. And I’m not sure about a Wiki, so for now, comment thread will suffice.
Alas, my thoughts on The Preamble to Constitution and Grammatical Originalism.