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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. ...

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. ...

I’ve gotten “.LRN”:http://www.dotlrn.org/ (MIT’s open source LMS) up and running, and I must say that I’m impressed. Out of the box, it supports “a lot” of what a normal thinking person would want to do. Being open source (based on postgres and openacs), we can make it do whatever else we want it to. Ahhh, I love open source…

Let’s pretend that a major foundation that is interested in the intersection of learning objects and online community had approached me about sponsoring a meeting of people with said interest, and I had funding to bring 12 or so people together for a multi-day summit this summer to discuss the state of the art and where we go from here. Which is all true. Who should I invite? You can only nominate five people, and none of them can be you.

Tonight I’ve added “Brad Choate”:http://www.bradchoate.com/’s excellent “Textile plugin”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/mttextile.php and John Gruber’s “SmartyPants plugin”:http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/ to the list of mayhem and mania the reusability.org blogs support. Here to quick-typin of some purty text.