Vol 13 No 2

Distance Learning Notes. There is little doubt about the importance of leadership in all or-ganizations in the complex and ever-changing context of the twenty-first century. The cult of leadership is especially visible to us now as the Americans, the French, and the Russians crank up their respective presidential leadership campaigns. But closer to home and the workplace, it is easy to think about leadership as being something for which someone else, higher up, is responsible. Surely our problems exist because the president, the provost, my department head, or my colleagues just aren’t being effective leaders! However, crowd sourcing, the viral influence of individual blogs and YouTube posts, and the power of tweets and Facebook posts force all of us to confront and take responsibility for our own leadership capacities. We can exercise a great deal of leadership in our homes, schools, and workplaces, but that leadership demands commitment, energy, and risk. All of us, as distance education researchers and practitioners, are challenged to maximize and optimize our respective leadership contributions. Our collective mission, to expand oppor-tunity and to increase the development and effective use of knowledge, demands that we be leaders and develop our individual leadership capacities. We hope this new series will help all of us to become more effective leaders. We welcome new articles from both students and practitioners for this series. The Leadership in Open and Distance Learning Notes section is edited by Professor Mar-ti Cleveland-Innes from the Centre for Distance Education at Athabasca University. Dr. Cleveland-Innes will be familiar to many IRRODL readers as an active sociologist and dis-tance education researcher and author. She has published on a variety of topics related to blended learning, the community of inquiry model, social change, and more. The premie