But then, in the months leading up to this issue, I had some moments on the World Wide Web that let me experience how it might actually live up to its educational promise.

First I discovered the "New Tools" site at the University of Pennsylvania with its intellectually stimulating essays by Jim O'Donnell. That led me on to the remarkable homepage of the Penn English department and the vast list of resource links maintained there.

One mouse click opened a menu listing English literature by period. I clicked on my area, the Eighteenth Century. There, another menu offered links to material on mathematics, art, music, and so on. Having started my college career in music, I clicked on music. There I found research sites on Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and others. I clicked on Bach, and at that site I found I could search his complete works by BWV number, title, key, instrumentation, year of composition — anything I could think of. As a test, I picked a remote key for eighteenth century composers (but a favorite key of mine), F# minor. Instantly I found that in addition to the preludes and fugues in Book I and II of the Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach wrote a Toccata (BWV 910) in that key in 1709. A few additional clicks and I had downloaded a MIDI file of that piece and was listening to it (all nine minutes of it) while clicking on in search of other music, pictures and databases related to topics of interest.

As I listened to the music and found the Web responding to my own mind, my own interests and imagination, I thought I could see how it could transform some aspects of teaching. It didn't give me my curiosity and direction, but it served them well.

Ed Nuhfer's report on attitudes toward technology among Colorado faculty confirms that others are also eager to harness these new powers in their teaching as well. (Nuhfer's full, detailed survey report is available for inspection on the The National Teaching & Learning Forum web site: http://www.ntlf.com.)

The present issue begins, not with talk of computers, however, but with Al McLeod's article on discovering and facilitating deep learning states. When I asked Al if he'd seen the reports in The National Teaching & Learning Forum (V5N1) on twenty-five years of research along these very lines carried out in England, Sweden, Canada and Australia, he confessed he had not and was not aware of that research. It's amazing how many paths to a grove of insights exist in the forest of human experience. McLeod's piece offers an invigorating complement to my earlier reports on that research. Al's is the longest single piece ever published in The National Teaching & Learning Forum, but because what he is talking about is so exciting and encouraging, I think you will find it reads quickly. Finally, we all know that daily life imposes low-tech routines which seem far removed from playing out patterns of deep cognition. What could seem more homely and dreary than taking attendance? Steve Rose acknowledges the drudgery, but reports that he's found a way to turn a once-onerous routine to his students' advantage. He's made it a learning experience filled with 'teachable moments.' And he's done it with the humblest of technologies — the venerable 3 x 5 index card.

" James Rhem