This seminar focuses on helping first-year writing teachers and administrators improve writing instruction. Prominent figures in the field run all-day workshops that facilitate the integration of innovative pedagogies and practices. This year's keynote address will be given by Katie Malcom and Nancy DeJoy the evening of June 6. Full-day workshops will be facilitated by Bump Halbritter, Karl Stolley & Amy Ferdinandt Stolley, Patricia Sullivan, Lisa Green, Nancy DeJoy & Steven T. Lessner, June 7-11, respectively. Participants may attend one or more days of the workshop.

In "ordinary life" I work as an administrator in the NHS, and in collaboration with my friends Julian Le Saux and David Hindmarsh I have recently started to put together a series of 10-minute puppet-videos chronicling the misadventures and frustrations of an ordinary (but rather hirsute) General Practitioner called Dr Hairy.

Newly co-published by Furtherfield and The Hyperliterature Exchange: an appreciation of Millie Niss, the writer and new media artist, who died in November of last year.

This semester another instructor and I are going to attempt "across-section" collaboration on projects. For a large project pairs or threesomes of students from his writing section will collaborate with pairs from my section of a technical writing course. The goal is to have students experience online collaboration similar to an all-online course, but with with an extensive safety net.

Anyone else work with a colleague to create virtual teams? What worked and what didn't?

My 11yo gamer son plays a text adventure for the first time... and asks for another one before bedtime. We stayed up until almost midnight, and I posted these screencasts the next day.

We started with Adam Cadre's "9:05", and continued with the Crowther and Woods classic "Colossal Cave Adventure".

Writing instructors who teach online or in networked classrooms are embracing highly collaborative Web 2.0 applications in their writing pedagogy. This essay collection, under contract with Fountainhead Press in the X Series for Professional Development, seeks to provide writing instructors with examples of writing classroom pedagogy that has creatively and effectively used new Web 2.0 applications in composition courses (such as FYC, Research Writing, Basic Writing, Argumentative Writing,and so forth).

I have turned in the draft of my dissertation, which was a study of writing courses and online "learning management systems" such as Moodle and Blackboard. In particular, I was examining students with special needs and if the LMS platforms used within our department adequately accommodated the students.

We have "template" courses, designed by senior faculty. The primary platform is WebVista (Blackboard). There is no template for Moodle, but it is approved by the department for use in comp and technical writing courses.

"Mr Thornton walked rapidly, without awaiting Dixon's slow movements. Margaret stood by the tea-table, resolved. The lines in her father's face were soft and waving, with a frequent undulating kind of trembling, the dreamy lids a considerable distance from the eyes. Mr Thornton's straight brows fell low, principally about the lips, one moment stretching from earth to sky and filling all the width of the horizon, at the next obediently compressed into a vase."

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?"

"Coffee stall by the front entrance. People drinking coffee in the shade of a tree. More or less everyone in suits. Business coffee-break. Giles, meet me at half-two, outside the church, for a power-espresso. Stockbrokers, financiers, commodity-dealers. I don't do tangibles, I do invisibles, I'm into futures, that's where the big money is. Right in front of the church steps. If Jesus were to pay an unexpected visit, I wonder if he'd knock their tables over?"