Dene Grigar, John F. Barber, and Hugh Burns have continued our Computers and Writing "family tradition" with as much style, substance and fun as any of the fifteen previous C&W conferences. Not only did this year's conference stand out among its predecessors, but it just may be the Goldilocks choice for writing instructors who find the information and interaction at the 4Cs too large and the MLA too small. Computers and Writing 2000 was a wired playground for 300 F2F attenders, as well as an interactive and online forum for many whose atoms could not follow their electrons. From May 25-28, writing teachers attended workshops, sessions, presentations, exhibitions and parties at the Worthington Hotel in Fort Worth, Texas. Some came to show off their cutting edges, some came to find ideas, some came to make transactional ideas possible, but most felt a sense of family belonging.

The Computers and Writing family is different from most other scholarly interest groups for a number of reasons. We are lead by two exceptional women – Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher – award winners and virtual mothers planting the seeds and showing us how to search for our own online gardens. Our fathers are too numerous to name but we have grown strong because so many of us have worked like fathers to provide a learning home for others. We are also lead by graduate students whose work continues to find field response more quickly than in any other area of academe. These "children" infused the conference with their emerging research, technical expertise, and enthusiasm for the future of teaching writing with computers. The conference was well managed, the participants were warm, friendly, and well-informed, and this family of learners exhibited many of our field's best qualities.

To make sense of these learning moments and to collect the impressions and ideas worthy of our continued reflection, Will Hochman, Jonathan Alexander, and Diane Masiello agreed to write this review. In some ways we are truly the poppa bear, momma bear, and baby bear to your Goldilocks, but we worked hard to offer our writing efforts and "cover" the conference as well as we possibly could. If you sense that this review already sounds too positive to be worthy of our field's high standards of critical thinking, read on! If you have comments, corrections, or would like to sign on to become a conference reviewer for Academic.Writing, click on!