Due to poor planning (ask me later) I’ve received a “new faculty grant” to start a free access, online, peer-reviewed, instructional technology “journal.” Of course, my inclination is to lean it toward learning objects / reusable media / online communities / blogs / open content / etc. for the topic or niche. But the point of the grant is to explore new publishing models, and there are a whole bunch of other exploratory things that could be done. (This of course all ties back into the recent lamenting about the sorry state of academic discourse in inst tech blog circles…) ...

Calling all EduBloggers… AERA is the biggest meeting of Ed Researchers on the planet (like 15,000 or something). Many of you will be in Chicago next week. Let’s get together and have dinner or drinks or something! If you’ll be in Chicago, post a comment describing when you’d be free to meet. I could make it any evening. (Please circulate.)

So I believe it is safe to say that (1) Stephen and I have agreed that we don’t really know each other, and (2) that our interests are similar. Below is hopefully the last (this is taking up waay too much bandwidth) public response in the on-going saga… ...

I don’t know if I’ve ever been more stunned than I was this morning reading Stephen’s recent comment to my “Community piece”:http://www.reusability.org/blogs/david/archives/000085.html… As the famous Monty Python skit goes, “some were bitter; others, confused.” Thoughts below. ...

My blogging mentor “Brian”:http://www.reusability.org/blogs/brian/ has put up a follow-on to my humble attempt at getting people up and running with blogs in the instructional technology community. Check out “Electric Boogaloo”:http://www.reusability.org/blogs/brian/archives/000091.html, which includes a link to “George”:http://www.elearnspace.org/cgi-bin/elearnspaceblog/’s “list of ’eduBloggers’":http://www.elearnspace.org/cgi-bin/elearnspaceblog/archives/000920.html. I’ve already noticed that I’m not doing a very good job following some of Brian’s suggestions… Time to step it up!

So I’m trying to draw some colleagues into the instructional technology blogosphere and had to write up a primer for folks who are new to the area… like I was a month or two ago. So, as long as I had to write it, I figured I’d throw it up on autounfocus. ...

So I’m trying to draw some colleagues into the instructional technology blogosphere and had to write up a primer for folks who are new to the area… like I was a month or two ago. So, as long as I had to write it, I figured I’d throw it up on autounfocus. ...

In the recent posts that have been going around about research on open source software communities, I haven’t seen anyone point to the motherlode yet.. “MIT’s Free / Open Source Research Community”:http://opensource.mit.edu/ It’s filled with good papers (including some graduate theses) about the how’s and why’s of the groups that make OSS work.

So “D’Arcy”:http://commons.ucalgary.ca/weblogs/dnorman/000089.html, “Brian”:http://www.reusability.org/blogs/brian/archives/000082.html, and “Alan”:http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/lora/ have been talking about using Trackback to contextualize learning objects. This is truly excellent! One of the goals of the “Instructional Architect”:http://ia.usu.edu/ was to facilitate automated recommendations (aka collaborative filtering) of learning objects, i.e., “people who used this learning object also used these other three.” However, we were only capable of carrying out these recommendations for content bundles authored within IA itself. Trackback would allow recommendations of LOs from arbitrary collections, so long as there were both in-bound and out-bound links on the LO’s homepage. It just keeps getting tastier and tastier…

Something Stephen said in a recent post has had me thinking quite a bit lately (and I’m too lazy to go find the post again now, doubtless someone will point it out in the comments). Stephen commented that he was “glad to see David [me] reaching out to the learning objects community.” It was such an interesting comment because I considered myself deeply entrenched in the learning objects community. ...