Thdnnkk
Thursday, November 18, 2004 at 5:49PM Pretty quiet here at B&B this week, had to speak at an MCLE program yesterday, finish up Monday's IP Memes (my last batch for the year), and help my son shake off an ear infection. Today is the first in two weeks he has really been himself again, and what happens? Ten minutes ago he cartwheels over the laundry basket head first into the chest at the foot of the bed. Why do babies inevitably lead with their heads? How do parents bear up psychologically under the non-stop avalanche of what we euphemistically call "boo-boos," where a couple of inches are all that stand between you and a sojourn in the Emergency Room wondering if they make a glass eye that small? He's fine, sound asleep. (Or possibly knocked out, it's hard to tell.)
The MCLE presentation yesterday went swell as such things go, but left me even further convinced there needs to be a shake-up in the ways in which continuing education requirements may be satisfied. It was one of these all-day affairs frequented largely (I'm guessing) by people who had pushed off their compliance obligations until the last minute. My colleague and I spoke for an hour and tried to include lively subject matter, but I couldn't help thinking the audience there for the duration must have felt exactly like they were attending traffic school. The educational, entertainment, and convenience value of blawgs and podcasts are a vast improvement over MCLE as we know it. Things like Ernie's podcasts, a rousing Lessig talk, and the learning involved in reading and/or writing a legal weblog strike me as orders of magnitude more compelling than logging time in a room somewhere to get your name on an attendance list. (Apologies to any of our audience members who might actually have enjoyed their day...) We blawgers will be doing the profession a great favor if we begin approaching our state bars about accrediting some of our more substantive online activities.
