Our NMC 2004 Small Pieces session intended to make a case for creating effective net-based collaboration using a discrete set of free tools, not so tightly controlled. This was fine, fun, and (frilly), but I wanted to describe here how we are trying to implement this for some real work.

We are headed into the 18th year of a faculty-led initiative for instructional technology at Maricopa called “Ocotillo” (see some history and the details on the metaphor). Dealing with technology, this almost organic organization evolves and re-invents itself, and just this past year, we “flipped” over a structure from representing college interests to topical ones (more details than anyone wants).

Anyhow, bottom line, this coming academic year, we will have four “action groups” each led by a pair of faculty, who will research, promote, prod, disseminate, dissect, and hopefully engage people in the areas of:

• Learning Objects
• Hybrid Courses
• ePortfolios
• Emerging Learning Technologies

Being a large, decentralized college system in an ever sprawling metropolis, I am vigorously promoting using more technology to share, communicate, and conduct this work, and get us out of the “F2F meeting/workshop” mode. So while ramping up for our Small Pieces presentation, I was also cobbling together a system of weblogs, wikis, and discussion boards, tied together with RSS, tape, and bailing wire, and hoping we can spring this effectively on our system this year.

In what will become a long rambling post, I will describe how this all works together. Brian has already pointed out that this is actually not loosely joined but rather “tight” (a compliment, I hope). And as an off kilter kind of success, before even sharing the URL, this morning already got a drug product spam (MTBlacklist now engaged)…