In "Bart Gets a Z," Bart Simpson has a young substitute teacher who's seriously wired. He sends a mass text to assign homework: "20 MINUTES OF TWITTERING." At one point, the teacher asks, "Who can tell me what the Monroe Doctrine was?"

An unfortunate student starts to answer: "The policy of President Monroe that America has the right as a nation to ...." The teacher interrupts him.

"Are you telling me you memorized that fact," he asks, "when anyone with a cell phone can find it out in thirty seconds?"

My daughter started high school a couple of weeks ago. She is now working on her first research paper in honors English.

This is the correct way to write a research paper:

1. Find information on the assigned topic.
2. Take notes on 3x5" notecards. Be sure to put everything in your own words, so you don't plagiarize by accident.
3. Arrange the notecards by topic.
4. Write an outline. The outline should include an introduction (with a thesis statement), three body sections, and a conclusion that restates the thesis.
5. Write a draft based on the outline.
6. Proofread the draft.
7. Make corrections.
8. Type it.
9. Turn it in.

I've taught at four institutions so far, and all of them required me to cover the traditional formal research paper. The assumption seems to be that professors in other departments give this sort of assignment frequently, and they believe it's the job of first-year composition instructors to make sure the students can complete it well.

DALLAS — A Dallas family has sued Australia's Virgin Mobile phone company, claiming it caused their teenage daughter grief and humiliation by plastering her photo on billboards and Web site advertisements without consent.

The family of Alison Chang says Virgin Mobile grabbed the picture from Flickr, Yahoo Inc.'s popular photo-sharing Web site, and failed to credit by name the photographer who took the photo. [...]

I've just started using Google Docs for a collaborative project, and I love it. The students seem pretty happy with it, as well. (They especially like the ability to revert to an earlier version.)

I know that a few other people on here are using it, too. How are you using it? What features do you find unusually helpful (or limiting)?

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. -- One Bloomfield Hills school is enforcing a new policy that will end the use of a popular Web site on the premises.

St. Hugo of the Hills Catholic School students were informed recently that under a new school policy, Think First, Stay Safe, the use of MySpace.com will be prohibited at school and at home.

The policy states that students enrolled in the school can't have a MySpace.com account or any similar type of personal site, according to a news release.

I'm teaching a technical and professional writing course that includes a four-week unit on Web design. We obviously won't be able to go into great depth, but I think it's reasonable to expect the students, at the end of that time, to be familiar with basic design considerations and able to put up a simple Web page.

Several tutorials have been mentioned on here, but I haven't seen anything lately. Has anyone been using anything that might be useful for this purpose?

Tom

The Director of Developmental Studies at my college called in all of the developmental writing instructors for a meeting. Among other things, we listened to a sales pitch for a new textbook. This textbook is apparently in wide use, and has been well received.

The promotional materials say that "textbooks should be visually appealing with bright colors, plenty of white space, and lots of diagrams and visual aids." This quotation is from someone with an Ed.D. who teaches at a large community college.

Well, I don't want to argue with anyone who has a doctorate in education. And certainly, this book has many bright colors. I especially like the orange, red, and yellow. Plus it has white space, which is white. And it has fascinating visual aids. For example, when the authors wish to link two concepts, they put a picture in the margin of two linked paper clips. Clever, huh?

I spent much of last week at a retreat dealing with learning communities, "classes that are linked or clustered during an academic term, often around an interdisciplinary theme, and enroll a common cohort of students." Because writing can be applied to almost any discipline, writing courses are often parts of learning communities. One computer science professor, however, objected to the idea of combining his course with a writing course: "The problem with giving all these writing assignments is that then I gotta grade them."

From what I could tell, "grading" writing assignments meant going over them with a red pen, writing "AWK" or "FRAG" in the margins. Several English faculty hastened to explain that not all writing assignments have to be graded. Indeed, one of their goals is to get students to see writing as an activity that makes and shares meaning, not as something done to get a grade.

This was my cue, so I stepped in. Blogs, I explained, are especially valuable for this purpose.

"The education of deaf students in the United States is not as it should be." This observation from Gallaudet University’s Robert Johnson demonstrates his gift for understatement. The average deaf high school graduate reads at about a fourth-grade level. And that doesn't even say anything about the literacy level of deaf high school dropouts, of whom there are far too many. (I don't mean to put down deaf high school dropouts. I'm one, myself. But in general, I think most people are better off finishing high school.) I find this problem a national disgrace. I can't solve the problem in this space, but I hope I can shed a tiny ray of light on the issue.