There's a great big (largely unaddressed) problem staring us in the face about how we feel about emotion. To be thought of as an "emotional person" isn't good. It usually implies one can't or doesn't "think straight." And yet when we come to assess the lives we admire and have been influenced by we speak of the passion in them. Today, a small chorus of voices has begun to suggest in a range of ways from talk of "spirituality" to "emotional intelligence" that perhaps we can't think meaningfully at all without our affective component. Virginia Lee's essay on the Taxonomy of the Affective Domain reminds us that our awareness of this in higher education has only been sleepy, not absent. What psychologists thought about how it all mapped out in the 1950s will be of use to faculty today in imagining how to make the unavoidably emotional usefully concrete.

The Forum's TECHPED column continues with Tom Rocklin's review of how computers may actually help take some of the drudgery out of teaching and create for faculty more time to ponder how to make tests really instructive. Following along the same theme, Susan Brookhart's ERIC TRACKS column shares the fruits of her recent work on a book about assessment.

Carolyn Johnson and Connie Ury return to talk about preventing Internet plagiarism, but this time they take a formative approach, outlining a variety of assignments that invite students to learn from the Web without being (too) tempted to crib from it.

And to close out the issue, a review of the video, "How to Speak: Lecture Tips from Patrick Winston." It's a good lecture that teaches how to lecture. Site licensees and other subscribers to the Forum can view a clip from the video on the Forum's Web site.

Indeed, www.ntlf.com carries much new material. Some of it supplements this particular issue, but there are additional goodies as well. With his kind permission, I have posted a transcript of the talk, "Learning, Working, and Playing in the Digital Age," that John Seeley Brown, director of the Xerox Research Center, gave at this year's AAHE conference in April. It's one of the most exciting presentations I've heard in years and I'm (yes) positively "emotional" about being able to post it for readers.

The Forum's article on Robert Rosenthal's "Pygmalion phenomenon" (V8, N2) stimulated a lot of reaction. In a posting on the Web site, Forum board member Jonathan Fife offers one of the most interesting responses. I hope readers will join in the discussion online and will open other lines of online conversation about articles in the Forum or other teaching and learning issues. The Web site's discussion forum area was intended for that purpose, but it's never taken off. Instead it became a dumping ground for requests for help with term papers on "nature v. nurture." We've restructured it so that it's now actually a moderated listserv open to public view. Irrelevant postings get weeded out, and readers can sign up and have the vetted postings sent to them via e-mail as with an ordinary listserv. To subscribe send an e-mail to maillist@www.ntlf.com and in the body of the message write "subscribe ntlf_forum".

The synergy between the compact and portable print newsletter and the expanded resources and connectability of the Web seems to me a wonderful opportunity to magnify the utility of a publication like this one. If you like what the Forum is doing, please pass along the bind-in subscription card in this issue to a colleague. Even in the digital age word-of-mouth remains the best and most effective means of spreading the good word.