Hello friends,

Welcome to the course weblog of "State and Local Public Finance," which is an additional channel of communication for our journey together on PA 5113, 2010 spring.

Throughout the semester, each of you will be required to post two blogs, one before the spring break and one after. The schedule will be determined in the first class and then posted in our Moodle course website.

The broad topic area for each week is generally following the lecture schedule (see the table below), with some exceptions. For example, we only have a week for education finance, but we have two separate weeks to blog about K-12 education finance (on 04/16) and higher education finance (on 04/23).

When it is your turn, you shall pick a specific point of interest, find related materials on the Internet or other sources, and present your comments or questions that are related to our lecture or readings. Each blog should provide hyperlinks to additional web-base resources, and I would love to see some multimedia ones, which are often really enjoyable. In the class, you will do a 2-minute "mini speech" about your post and may answer one or two questions.

You are all encouraged to read these blogs and add comments. Each week we will select a "Post of the Week," whose author will be awarded 1 extra point in participation score.

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.