Pitch is approximately one week old, and we’ve yet to see entries make it into the review queue. I know many of you have existing articles that are worthy of peer review… Perhaps they were first published on your blog. Perhaps you wrote them out of midnight frustration or (even worse) as an assignment for a course. For whatever reason, you’ve got good quality pieces of instructional technology writing laying around. Why not submit it for review and publication? Let’s see if we can get five articles in the review queue by January 1, 2004. What do you say?

If you were given some curriculum materials and told that the were licensed free for “educational use,” which of the following would you interpret that to mean: a) that you would need to provide some reference or “give credit” to the materials’ creator, and/or b) that any changes you made to the materials needed to be shared freely with others, and/or c) that the materials were not to be used commercially, and/or d) that the materials should only be used in the context of a formal educational institution (e.g., not to be used for self-study by individuals not enrolled as students in a formal school), and/or e) that the materials are only to be used for educational or research purposes. ...

If you were given some curriculum materials and told that the were licensed free for “educational use,” which of the following would you interpret that to mean: a) that you would need to provide some reference or “give credit” to the materials’ creator, and/or b) that any changes you made to the materials needed to be shared freely with others, and/or c) that the materials were not to be used commercially, and/or d) that the materials should only be used in the context of a formal educational institution (e.g., not to be used for self-study by individuals not enrolled as students in a formal school), and/or e) that the materials are only to be used for educational or research purposes. ...

So I was scooped by Stephen on my own project (!), but Pitch Journal is officially open for “business.” Stop by to read the first few articles and begin submitting your own material (reprints from your blog are ok) for peer-reviewed publication. Thanks to everyone for their support and interest. UPDATE: The URL (which I had forgotten earlier) is “http://pitchjournal.org/":http://pitchjournal.org

Quoting from a new paper by “The Center for Economic and Policy Research”:http://www.cepr.net/ Co-Director Dean Baker, The AFV is an alternative designed to maximize the power of individual choice, while working with the full potential of technology. Whereas the copyright system provides a state-enforced monopoly leading to enormous costs, inefficiencies and enforcement problems, the AFV provides a voucher system for creative workers that would lead to savings to consumers, taxpayers and the government. Lower advertising costs, an end to police or FBI crackdowns on students downloading music, and less monitoring by internet service providers of their customers are just a few examples of savings from the AFV system. ...

Had to point to this great post over on Learning Circuits: “We are the Problem: We are selling Snake Oil”:http://www.internettime.com/lcmt/archives/001014.html. To quote briefly: We now have ample data to show that: – Training does not work. – eLearning does not work. – Blending Learning does not work. – Knowledge Management does not work. Although it will seem uncharacteristic, I’m not sure how I feel about the piece. Some of it must certainly be true… the question is, how much?

Without knowing it was going to happen, I met Maish from “Elearningpost”:http://www.elearningpost.com/ at the Learning Objects conference in Singapore yesterday. A very welcome surprise… Who would we hang out with when we travel around the globe if it weren’t for people from the blogosphere? Maish wrote a “complimentary summary of my sessions”:http://www.elearningpost.com/archives/2003_11.asp#002220 yesterday for those who missed last week’s thread on the topic.

How did I miss this one? One of the coolest guys around is now intellectually exposing himself in the blogosphere. “http://rubens.cs.kuleuven.ac.be:8989/mt/blogs/ErikLog/":http://rubens.cs.kuleuven.ac.be:8989/mt/blogs/ErikLog/ This is great news… I’d been having a devil of a time keeping up with him.

Wayne Hodgins normally gets to give this talk, but in a few weeks it will be my turn. In preparation for a talk to be delivered at the Singapore National Learning Objects Conference, I did a survey of people I follow, what they?re doing relating to online teaching and learning, and looked for trends… ...

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation will be funding the OSLO Research Group’s next two projects. Synopses follow. Open Learning Support (OLS), our partnership with MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative, will build a social infrastructure around the OCW materials, allowing informal study groups to form and enabling learners to provide and receive peer support while using the OCW materials. EduCommons is our “SourceForge for educational materials” project. We hope that EduCommons will facilitate the development and release of significant new educational materials for years to come, including derivative works based on / localizations of OCW content. ...