Perhaps we can "see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower," as Blake once wrote, but as an anonymous sage said (probably long before Blake), "sometimes we can't see the forest for the trees." Many of the articles in this issue engage these quite different ideas about point of view, how we know, and what knowledge boils down to wisdom and what doesn't. We live in an "information age," where data come at us in undifferentiated streams. As it was left to Adam to name the plants and animals, it still falls to us to make sense of things.

In different ways K. Patricia Cross and Lee Shulman, speaking at AAHE's annual conference, "Taking Learning Seriously," in Atlanta last month, both suggested we already know a lot about what we've tried to foster--learning. We haven't seen the forest of it, however, because we've loved the trees so much. The "trees," of course, are the rigors of traditional research methods, the levers that have long meant status, tenure, advancement. Shulman, in a neo-rabbinical style, and Cross, speaking like the no-nonsense head of a powerful woman's caucus, said maybe we've learned enough that way to begin to grow up a little. Can we begin to mature in our knowledge about learning and begin to see, not the assembly line structure beneath it--there isn't one--but the marvelously individuated, yet systemic ecology of it?

Laura Border's DEVELOPER'S DIARY will seem as though it's going in a different direction, away from cognition and toward affect. That's only because of those trees again: We've known affect and cognition went together, just as teaching and learning do, but we've remained bewildered by the knowledge. How should, how could, that knowledge influence effective teaching? Harking back to research by Timothy Leary from the 1950s and a diagnostic instrument he developed, Border describes a practical approach to harnessing affect for teaching purposes. (Ambitious readers may also want to look at the second volume of Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy for other neglected insights from the 1950s on affect and learning.)

On the sensory level, a diagnostic instrument called VARK, developed in New Zealand by Neil Fleming, offers students a chance to see how they prefer to learn. Don't confuse preferences with "learning styles" or personality or with strengths. They're not the same. Becoming conscious of the fact that you like to see things diagrammed or spoken out loud or demonstrated with solid objects can have immediate implications for study habits, however, and may help you perform better in school right now.

As my early jump from sand and flowers to forests and trees suggests, we operate in a world of lumbering, provisional judgments more than in a realm of poetry. At the very least we can hope those judgments will try to be fair. David Anderson and Harry Landreth, economists who teach at Kentucky's Centre College, discuss seven problems to consider in trying to create an ideal mechanism for evaluating teaching.

Let us not forget evil in our forest. It's there. As the Internet creates a new Web of information, it's also enhanced the old tangled one of deception. Student plagiarism of material taken from the Internet has grown as the Web has, but Carolyn Johnson and Connie Ury, librarians from Northwest Missouri State, outline techniques for locating material plagiarized from the Internet.

If the Net poses problems, it also offers opportunities for new modes of learning and new models of learning communities. Explore some of these riches in resources compiled by Vincent Tinto.

As the "wrap" around this issue of the Forum suggests, we see the Web as a wonderful way to bring more people together in the long, noble struggle of teaching and learning.