For the past few weeks, a reporter from the Pittspurgh Post-Gazette has been working on an article on weblogs in higher education. I was delighted to see some of my favorite anecdotes about my students' blogging made their way into the article.

Freedom of speech redefined by blogs: Words travel faster, stay around longer in the blogosphere (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

Jessica Prokop thought the textbook for her class at Seton Hill University was biased and that its author "seems like a bitter man." In the annals of student rants, nothing extraordinary there.

Except she didn't just blurt out those words in her journalism class. She blogged them. Soon, the author himself was responding all the way from England, pledging to re-examine an upcoming edition given her critique.

Junior Mike Rubino got a more extreme lesson about free speech in the blogosphere. His "10 reasons why Seton Hill doesn't need a football team," including a claim that "jocks" would bring more drugs, alcohol and fights to campus, irked arriving players who found his Internet posting months later.

"I even got calls to my room," he said. "They talked to my roommate, thinking it was me, saying things like they're going to kick my butt."

It begun when I read RIP-OFF 101, a report detailing how the textbook industry is inflating the costs of college textbooks by a variety of means, most of them devious. It goes beyond the "new edition" that differs only in pagination. It's a national scandal. I don't want to be associated with it. I find it embarrassing. I want it to go away. Let me add my voice to those of students demanding that the the $70 composition textbook remain on the shelf. We don't need them that badly and never did. Thankfully, there is something we can do about it. Find out how.

Dear Kairos Readers,

The Institute for the Future of the Book is pleased to announce the launch of next\text, a new project designed to encourage the creation of born-digital learning materials that will enhance, expand, and ultimately replace the printed textbook.

There are two stages to the next\text project. The first is a curated website showcasing significant projects currently in the field. The aim is to draw attention to a broad range of experiments that identify ways in which digital media and networks are expanding the potential of textbooks, redefining the role of teacher and student, and converging to create new ecologies for educational institutions. These areas include, but are in no way limited to: "expanded" multimedia textbooks; "open-source" textbooks continually improved by teachers and students; dynamic, networked textbooks with live or regularly updating components; collaborative work spaces; and multi-user games.

I serendipitously encountered this collection of student projects from a course at Stanford: Computer Science 201, Computers, Ethics, and Social Responsibility. Looks like it was a stimulating course, judging from the students' work:

Projects from Winter Quarter 2000-01

• The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act: Ethical Issues in Software Commerce Law
• Women and Computer Science at the College Level
• The Shortage of Female Computer Science Faculty at Stanford
• The Effects of the Internet on the Personal Lives of Stanford Students
• The Open-Source Movement
• Rage With The Machine: Grassroots Democracy in the Digital Age
• Not Just Dirty Pictures: The Social and Legal Implications of Online Pornography
• Privacy: Implications of "Cookies" and Other Clickstream Capture Technologies
• The Web vs. the Honor Code
• Participatory Design: An Approach for Systems Design
• A Retrospective on Computer Viruses
• Packet-Monitoring Software
• DVD Encryption: A Survey of the Current State of Affairs
• The Impact of the Internet on Developing Countries