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I’d like to introduce you to Amanda Baggs. She’s a prolific blogger, an avid user of the virtual reality world Second Life, and a popular video blogger on YouTube. She also happens to be severely autistic, and she’ll change the way you think about the role of Web 2.0 in people’s lives.

Mainstream media has finally started covering the case of Julie Amero, the substitute teacher who was found guilty of child endangerment because some of her students saw adult-oriented popup ads on her computer screen. And the news coverage is causing a lot of educators to say to themselves in horror: It could have been me.

Middlebury College is now informing students that Wikipedia is not appropriate for research, and that they use it at their own academic peril. Somewhat surprisingly, Wikipedia doesn’t necessarily disagree with them.

Right now I’m at an annual gathering of news executives and Web 2.0 activists in Miami, listening to speaker after speaker talking about the ever-changing media landscape. Even with all of these luminaries extolling the Internet on the conference stage, it was a dinner conversation over the role families play in fostering media literacy that got me thinking more than anything else here.

Ever since substitute teacher Julie Amero was convicted last month of exposing her students to pornography on her classroom computer, bloggers have been debating who’s to blame, with most siding with her. Now, a published interview with a tech consultant who analyzed the Internet user logs for the day of the incident raises some difficult questions about potential failures of the school’s IT department.

A student records a teacher violating school policies, leading to a ban on students taping teachers. What’s the story here, and who do you think is right?

As yet another school district bans students from carrying cell phones, a mobile phone carrier heads in the other direction, creating school-based contests to encourage students and their parents to interact via text messaging. The timing couldn’t be worse.

The official text of the bill to replace the Deleting Online Predators Act has been published, and it goes beyond the scope of the original legislation, addressing child pornography, cyberbullying and children’s privacy. Let’s take a look under the hood and see what’s going on with DOPA Jr., and how it may affect every educator who uses blogs and other Web 2.0 tools in their teaching.

It didn’t take long for the latest generation of the DOPA legislation to rear its head on Capitol Hill. But will the bill go anywhere this time around?

The blogosphere is rallying in support of a substitute teacher who was convicted on porn charges despite evidence suggesting she was a victim of malicious computer software and a lack of technical safeguards on the part of the school.