I banned pencils from my classroom this year…

Electrifying Language » American Scientist: “Putting this bill of indictment in perspective, Baron points out that just about every other new writing instrument has also been seen as a threat to literacy and a corrupter of youth. The eraser had a particularly bad reputation, under the thesis that ‘if the technology makes error correction easy, students will make more errors.’ “

For different reasons, but a good retrospective on writing technologies.