Tom Creed, technology editor and TECHPED columnist for the Forum, died March 8th of liver cancer. We spoke by phone several times in the week before he died, and in the weeks since his passing I have thought continually about him, his meaning in my life and in the life of this publication. In a conversation with Ted Marchese, editor of CHANGE magazine, about "teacher enthusiasm," I finally realized Tom's essential character. "Enthusiasm" only seemed to describe him; "joy" got to the heart of it. Enthusiasm comes and goes; joy of the kind Tom had "never faileth." His boundless energy, his eagerness to explore how we might teach better as we come to understand the new technologies at our disposal, began and ended in his joy of learning. He saw teaching as the most exalted fun one could have, because it helped learning along its ever-unwinding path. The TECHPED column he created will continue, as will the Virtual Companions he prepared to accompany each column on the Forum's Web site. (They are all archived in the Web site's library section.) Tom would be glad to know that what he started will go on. He would be touched to know how very sharply he is missed.

Many readers will know the work of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Its reports have influenced the conversational agenda in education for many years. But you may not know the variety of new programs that have recently been started at Carnegie under the foundation's current president, Lee Shulman. With underwriting support from the foundation, this issue of the Forum offers the first of two special sections of independent coverage devoted to the new work now in progress, and how it may influence the conversation in the decades ahead.

This issue inaugurates another new feature, "Ad Rem," which (more or less) is Latin for "get on with it." Linc. Fisch, a familiar voice in faculty development circles, contributes the first of these short, practical items designed to have plug-and-play utility.

Virginia Lee offers the first of two articles on the famous Taxonomy of Educational Objectives by Benjamin Bloom, et al. Written in the 1950s, the Taxonomy has proven one of the most durable and useful tools around. Here, Lee suggests ways it can lend precision to course design as well as assessment.

Following from recent articles in the Forum (including "Pygmalion in the Classroom," V8, N2), Steve Rose offers a scheme for empirically assessing a teacher's equitable and effective classroom performance within the context of such well-established good practices as "latency," "attentive listening," "precise encouragement," and the like.

Ron Cramer profiles a large Abnormal Psychology class that feels like an intimate discussion thanks to good pedagogy and improved technology. Focusing on a TA who wouldn't believe his teaching was less than perfect, Laura Border's DEVELOPER'S DIARY argues that there's little excuse for not improving one's teaching with so many helpful resources available.

Finally, Taddy Kalas offers an important corrective to an excessive focus on the student's voice. In this LEARNING DIARY, Kalas tells a moving story of how in trying to give her students voice, she denied them access to something valuable, something only she could bring into her classroom, her voice.