Via Earth Wide Moth, here's a neat, open-source animation tool called Pencil. For those teaching new media, this tool might provide an interesting way to provide students with another mode in which to write.

Michael at A Collage of Citations writes of a Chicago High School student arrested because of a "disturbing" piece of writing. Michael raises some interesting questions:

The police chief said disorderly conduct can be when writing disturbs someone, but this seems to be a fairly subjective definition with very little clarity on implementation: Whose writing is it that disturbs someone? Who is being disturbed?

Maybe this is, in part, a knee-jerk reaction to the Virginia Tech shootin

While browsing wikipedia, I ran into the section on Wikibooks. These are books/textbooks on various topics. And, of course, they are edited on the wiki format. Check out the Composition Wikibook or the one on literary criticism. I wonder if these would be useful in the classroom. I also wonder if a good classroom exercise might be for students to write a section/chapter of one of these books.