Join In Our Ocotillo Kickoff (blogs, wikis, discussion boards are standing by)

Some readers may have followed our mention new efforts this year with our ‘Ocotillo’ faculty-driven technology initiatives, now in its 18th year of existence.

This year, we ripped the page right out of the Small Pieces Loosely Joined concept and built a system to support our four action groups that will lead activities and projects on:

Each group publishes their activities, findings, ideas on a weblog. Each group also has a wiki of its own to build collaborative resources, and a discussion board to have “conversations” (previously alluded to in July 2004).

The map sort of looks like:

larger image

So four groups times a blog,, wiki, and board = 12 information sources.. plus a blog for the General faculty Ocotillo chair and we have it all tied together with RSS or RSS-like feeds to present a dashboard view of all the activity… we call Ocotillo Central:

http://graphite.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/

This week we’ve announced to our system the new setups via an online kickoff event. We have short video welcomes from the 8 faculty co-chairs, plus our Chancellor, 2 Vice Chancellors, a Dean, and the faculty general chair. These have been set up to be available in QuickTime, Real, or Windows Media streaming formats. The ideas is to give our people an idea who is leading this initiatives, and why they are important, and then ask them to join in on some discussions via our web boards.

Well, the action has been okay, but slow. People are reading the boards, and we can see a number of account created there, but there is not a whole lot of discussion… so to set some things into frothy motion, I am inviting any CogDogBlog readers to join in– as our intent all along was to have this system by open to people inside and outside of Maricopa.

So here it is. Visit the Virtual Kickoff at:
http://graphite.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/kickoff.php

where there are instructions for how to use the discussion boards. The boards are open to the world to read, but to participate, you must register to create an account (and confirm via an auto generated email).

So come on in and stir things up. Who knows what will happen.

We have been working on getting people who have experience or expertise in these areas to join us as “guests” for topical discussions in the web boards. Contact me if you want to be a virtual guest.