Those of us who came of age in the sixties to the strains of The Times They Are A'Changin' could not have predicted the enormity nor the pervasiveness of those changes, especially in education.

We've seen trends come and go. We've accepted an increasingly heavy burden thrust on us by a society whose greater concern about equality and justice often fails to "trickle down" to minorities and children, and, especially, to minority children.. We've adjusted as governments got bigger and more intrusive in education and then adjusted again as they've "downsized." We've learned to do more with less and, more recently, less with less. On the whole, though, most of us can say with confidence, that we are doing a better job of educating children than we were thirty or forty years ago. That the media and government might have different views is the subject for another column. What all this means is that for the past three decades or so, we have engaged in a major rethinking of the entire educational enterprise. In recent years, that thinking has been complicated and enriched by the impact of the technological revolution.

Because of technological advances, our pedagogical capabilities are growing at a dizzying rate of speed. We can now see the potential for educational change of a magnitude that is unprecedented, at least since the invention of the printing press. Never before have we had such a wealth amount of information so readily available so quickly. Whether we can reshape educational practice to take advantage of what we now have and what we will soon have available remains to be seen, but I believe that we can. Members of the Faculty of Education believe that we can, and in the past two years have taken many steps to ensure that our students are exposed to best current practice using computer-based technologies.

A little over a year ago, we opened a new 48-seat Pentium laboratory in the Faculty of Education, and when this laboratory is not filled with students working on course assignments or "surfing" in the way that our generation browsed the library stacks, it is populated by faculty members who are rethinking their delivery options and redesigning their courses to take advantage of the fact that students can now learn 30% more in 30% less time. Realizing that both those numbers will likely get larger, we are cognizant of the need to keep learning and growing. A few months ago, we opened a state-of-the-art Science and Technology Laboratory, another facility that we needed in order to provide our students the kind of education they need to be effective teachers in the next century.

In January, Dr. Ken Stevens will join the Faculty as the first holder of the Chair in TeleLearning, funded in large part by Industry Canada. A specialist in rural and small schools, Dr. Stevens will help to focus the Faculty's research efforts on the impact of technology on schooling in Newfoundland and Labrador. Individual members of the Faculty are experimenting with using the Internet for course delivery, and as a Faculty, we are working toward the goal of having some degree of web page support for every course offered in the Faculty by January of 1998.

Indeed, the times they still are a'changin', and The Morning Watch is changing with them. As evidence, we mount our first issue of the "virtual" Morning Watch. This new way of producing and delivering The Morning Watch, however, signals no less commitment to the journal and its readers. Educational technology should be neutral. It is a tool - an instrument and not an agent. The editors of The Morning Watch and members of the Faculty of Education remain the agents of change but hope to use the instruments as effectively as possible. With this issue, then, comes change but with that change we also continue a well-established tradition. We hope that our new format will permit faster and wider dissemination and allow for more direct interaction with our readers.