Moving into 2005

Happy New Year from the Technology & Learning team. As with many of you, no doubt, we've made some resolutions for moving forward into 2005. First, in honor of our 25th anniversary-yes, T&L is officially a quarter century old-we'll be devoting each month's Back Page to interviews with those who've significantly impacted the direction of education technology over the past 25 years. We kick off that department in this issue with a conversation with the ever-engaging futurist, Ian Jukes. Accompanying the interviews, we'll bring you Back in Time, quick snippets and highlights from our archives.

We hope you'll enjoy the year's unfolding historical perspective.

You'll also notice that we've expanded Trend Watch to two pages. We'll be continuing to report on new products, legislation, and other trends, as well as reader responses to our What's Your Opinion? question. As well, we'll be incorporating more trend items from techLEARNING.com. This month, we feature a tip from Wesley Fryer's popular online column, The IT Guy. Watch for more of such tips from the IT Guy, as well as online columnist Barbara Bray's Professional Development Quick Tips, to be incorporated into the pages of the magazine.

In addition to the above, we'll be providing you with three 25th Anniversary Special Reports delivered within the pages of the magazine this year. Under the heading "Celebrating 25 Years," we'll be focusing on Celebrating Students, Saluting Innovation, and Envisioning the Future. Watch for the first of these in our February issue.

Meanwhile, this month we explore a new perspective on the topic of leadership with Peter Reilly's "Leadership: Walking the Talk." Reilly, a regular speaker at our Tech Forum events, shakes up the topic a bit by reminding us what it means to go beyond lip service to truly "embody" the concept. Enhancing this article is a sidebar detailing the leadership "secrets" of top consumer company CIOs, which we think you'll agree has lots of carryover for today's education community.

Also this month, Iris Lafferty brings you a roundup of the latest offerings supporting Reading First in "A Brand New Read," and Peter Weinstein details key buying considerations and notable features of 11 of the newest tools for mobile evaluation in "Assessment Unplugged."

And finally, on the face-to-face professional development front, "Tech Forum Highlights," captures the essence of our one-day conference, which we like to think of as "T&L in action." For information on upcoming Tech Forum events, please see http://www.techlearning.com/events/techforum/chi05/index.html. We hope you'll consider joining us in the future.