I recently had the privilege to participate in a collaborative research project to develop and validate a Community of Inquiry research instrument. Members of the team, in alphabetical order, are Ben Arbaugh, Marti Cleveland-Innes, Sebastian Diaz, Phil Ice, Jennifer Richardson, Peter Shea, Karen Swan and myself. The team was led by Phil Ice and early results of our work were presented at the Sloan-C Conference in Orlando in November. A three factor solution with oblique rotation was presented. All variables loaded cleanly on the expected factor/presence. This suggests a stable instrument that could be used in a variety of studies, including large scale inter-institutional or cross-disciplinary studies. A second Community of Inquiry presentation followed immediately after the instrument validation presentation that explored various theoretical research issues associated with the framework. This was led by Marti Cleveland-Innes and Karen Swan. Finally, I was involved in a third presentation led by Norm Vaughan on the topic of blended learning and student engagement. We reported on the evaluation of blended course redesign at the University of Calgary. Norm and I also had the pleasure of having supper with Erin Null (picture above), an Associate Editor at Jossey-Bass, who worked with us in the development of our book Blended Learning in Higher Education. All in all it was an interesting and successful conference.