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Will WordPress take over law schools?

September 21, 2013

20130921-160150.jpg Ronnie Burt (@ronnieburt), Director of Sales and Operations at Edublogs, shares 29 ways WordPress is taking over Universities and Higher Ed. As way of background, Edublogs is a WordPress based publishing platform used by over 2 million educations.

Rather than look at WordPress as solely a blog platform, Burt says educators ought to leverage WordPress to meet all sorts of web and technology needs.

Burt demonstrates the the range of WordPress with 29 current university and higher education sites, including the below.

  • University website
  • Marketing site
  • Professor blogs
  • Research findings
  • Online courses
  • Alumni magazines
  • Library blogs
  • Admissions sites
  • Student portfolios
  • Faculty bios
  • Course blogs
  • Summer program
  • Student organizations

WordPress is perfect for law schools. Law schools have limited technology budgets and technology personnel. Law schools are also lagging in there use of innovative publishing and social media solutions.

WordPress is an open source solution with a rich and mature development community. Sites can be developed, modified, and used at a fraction of the cost of other tech solutions.

Law school alumni are a network. But how is that network leveraged by law schools? By occasional and geographically limited alumni socials and the back pages of quarterly law school magazines citing alumni, mostly for Super Lawyer and Best Lawyer recognition.

Imagine an alumni network which empowers lawyers to publish, via WordPress, insight and commentary on the law. Or a curation of alumni law blogs and Tweets built on a WordPress site.

This would enable alumni to discover and network with each other in a meaningful way — as well as build an intimate relationship between the alumni and their law school.

How about law students publishing on niche areas of interest? Students come into law school knowing online publishing on WordPress or WordPress-like solutions like the back of their hands.

Students would be further coached and advised in this regard by law professors who were blogging (possibly as a requirement) to advance legal dialogue and enhance their reputation.

Why not the law school dean regularly posting to a law school site along with other law school personnel? Maybe that site shines a light on alumni on regular (weekly or bi-weekly) basis. Get a student from the journalism school, if needed , to do ‘hero stories’ on alums.

Makes little sense for law reviews not to be published on WordPress. Articles in reviews must be able to be syndicated to largeer sites aggregating content. Think Flipboard or Zite for professional journals. Law reviews are no longer bound on shelves huddled in the back of the law school library with reviews from other schools.

We’re soon to see WordPress become as ubiquitous as Word is for online publishing. And better than just publishing one publication or article, WordPress enables content from hundreds or thousands of sources to seamlessly come together in one site for discovery and further personal syndication to RSS readers.

Law schools out be limited only by their imagination when it comes to the use of WordPress.

For any number of reasons, including common sense, WordPress may indeed take over law schools.

Image courtesy of Flickr by NCinDC.

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