To dispose of a major issue, No, the Net shouldn’t replace teachers. I couldn’t agree more with Cliff Stoll when he rants against lax standards and mindless technocratic schemes. Well-trained teachers can provide inspiration and guidance to help children explore networks on their own. The last thing we need is to turn the educational reaches of the Net into one big flash card. What the Net can do is prepare children to deal with source material, with actual papers written by researchers, as opposed to pabulum in textbooks. Correctly, Stoll criticizes some educators for teaching astronomy without children studying the actual sky; computer programs should only supplement such activities, not replace them. But shouldn’t he apply the same “real thing” logic to Web-distributed source material and applaud students’ easier access to it? Only the brightest children will benefit from a complicated mathematical treatise. But surely even an average student could take advantage of a historian’s paper on a nearby Civil War battle. If anything, teachers could use the Web and other areas of the Net to demand _more_ research from students. Just why must Stoll compare the Net to a fun but dumb educational film? Is a Web version of the _Odyssey_ to be confused with some educational Looney Tunes? Intriguingly, Web technology makes it possible for students to produce information, not just soak it up. In Fairfax County, Virginia, students at Thomas Jefferson, a high school for the gifted, are posting their “pages” on the World Wide Web. I can remember when college applicants submitted tape recordings of their music. Now they can also give M.I.T. or Caltech the addresses of their Web pages and demonstrate, in the most direct way, their familiarity with networking. They can post their papers and point to other people’s pages that interest them. Also, at Jefferson and countless other schools, students can electronically send their classmates to knowledge-rich sites on the Web. Clicking on “NASA” in blue letters within Bob’s area, Jill can see what the space program is doing. Then she can return, click on other blue letters, and check out his tip to visit a history-related site discussing the Sputnik and Vanguard days. Via a project called MendelWeb, Ellen can read the famous treatise of Gregor Mendel, the geneticist, and retrieve other scientists’ opinions; then she might write her own paper and post it on the Web for classmates and even for students elsewhere. Clearly the value of the Net, for students and researchers alike, isn’t just in the information per se—it’s also in the ease of sharing it. Teachers can point to common Web resources (such as MendelWeb) from Web pages where they add their own comment, or even their own study guides. They can also link to other guides.