Good morning and welcome to the school without-- cybercollege, where the unseen teach the unheard. After five years of dealing with flesh and blood students, PNS commentator Esther Cohen, who claims to be completely mystified by computers, finds some intriguing possibilities in education over the internet. Esther Cohen lives and writes in New York City.

"Welcome to a school with no walls -- also no ceiling, no floor, no gravity. Welcome to an internet university. I'm your teacher, Ms. Cohen."

Actually, I don't even know what "cyber" means -- it sounds like an unpleasant vegetable, sort of light green -- but here I am teaching on the internet.

There are thousands of people in this unfamiliar country, a country that didn't exist just a few years ago. And vast numbers take classes in colleges and universities whose campus is part of a world as unfamiliar as Mars.

I am not computer savvy, or at ease in this space that some people call a highway, although it's unlike any road I've ever seen. I find myself on this mysterious road because my friend Pam led me here.

Pam is a persuasive person. She is an art director, through personality and profession. For years, she created order out of chaos, commissioning illustrations to make articles clearer, adding white space where it was needed.

I admire her because I am a creator of chaos, a disorderer of order. My illustrations are all words, and my words are not in neat coherent rows surrounded by white space. They are on envelopes and calendars, Nepalese notebooks and paper towels. And they often don't make sense.

Five years ago, Pam became Director of Continuing Education at Parsons School of Design, and she invited me to teach writing there. I taught the old fashioned way, walking into a room full of students sitting in various stages of discomfort.

They were tired. They didn't like writing or English. They had better things to do. It was a nice day and they could go outside. It was a rainy day and they could sleep or go to the movies. It was snowing, and they didn't like cold.

Whatever. I could look at them, with their bright green hair and intriguing outfits, their red-painted lips and high black shoes, and have some idea what they were thinking. If they weren't paying attention, if they hadn't done their reading, if their papers were late, I could speak to them right there, with my voice. And sometimes, they'd do better.

Then Pam told me to teach on the net. She had an idea that I would like it.

To teach on the net, you have to take a course first. It's like learning a language. I haven't learned anything new for years. Not that I haven't wanted to. I've had many good intentions -- Italian, painting, science, the Greeks, have been on my list for years and years. So the internet class was the first class I've joined since college.

There we all were, in a universe where time and space and words and even people become something else. I was with a group of interesting others: a rabbi/psychoanalyst, a Joyce scholar, a British social scientist, an MD/spiritualist, a purveyor of Frank Lloyd Wright, a Native American anthropologist. We learned the basics together. Some could write their names in yellow or blue, upload and download, make words come alive. A web designer named Eden made a bird move across our classroom.

It felt odd but not unpleasant, like eating a tart and unfamiliar fruit. I looked forward to being with these people, who I would never see and never know in the customary way -- by sight, by smell, by a complication of gestures, by tone of voice and thickness of hair, by the way fingers hold pens, by the sound of walking into rooms, by the visual details that make us real to one another. This kind of knowing was only about words: what words they had in what patterns, what they did and didn't say.

And for someone who teaches language, who uses words as a way of talking and a way of keeping secrets, this was an interesting prospect. What would we say about (or to) each other? How would we learn?

Now I'm in this environment every day, and it is just like an unfamiliar country, a country with a language, a bird, and a flag. Every day, I greet my students, not seeing them, or knowing whether or not they'll appear. What's funny is that I like it, like the freedom of the silence. Even the distance has its appeal. What I like most is the way our words loop around each other, binding the class together.

It's way too soon to tell what all this really means. Or even, what the word for it will be.

For now though, I am one of many, walking tentatively through somewhere that is neither air nor water, somewhere as quiet and powerful as wind.